Creativity and Learning: Contexts, Processes and Support (Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture) 3030770656, 9783030770655

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction: Creativity and Learning as Sociocultural and Intertwined Phenomena
Sociocultural Perspective for Creativity and Learning
Creativity and Learning as Intertwined Phenomena
Focus, Purpose, and Contents of the Book
The Main Conclusions of This Book
Change and Uncertainty as Bases for Creativity and Learning
Agency and Autonomy (as Sources of Creative Interactions) Leading to Creativity and Learning
Cultures, Shared Goals, and Different Methods of Building, Supporting, and Facilitating Creative Learning Communities
References
2 Uncertainty: A Necessary Condition for Creative Learning
Introduction
The Role of Uncertainty in Creative Learning
Intra and Interpsychological Processes of Creative Learning
Agentic and Socio-Cultural Perspective
Secondary Phase of Creative Learning
Uncertainty in Educational Practices Supportive of Creative Learning
Encountered Uncertainty
Planned Uncertainty
Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice
References
3 Time to Think: Lessons about Purpose and Agency from Case Studies
Introduction
Gruber’s Emerging Point of View
Network of Enterprise
From Historical Materialism to Gestalt Holism
Piaget and Systemic Development
The Cognitive Revolution
The Darwin Case
Experimental Epistemology
Social Activism
Evolving Systems
The Individual as Evolving System
Method
Studying the Organization of Work
Generalizability of Findings
Generalized Questions
Legacy: Distributed and Participatory Creativity
Educational Implications
Long-Term and Holistic Perspectives on Learning
Individuality in Complex Distributed Systems
Case Studies
Conclusion
References
4 Developing Intelligence and Creativity in Education: Insights from the Space–Time Continuum
Introduction
Education in the Industrial and Information Societies
On the Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity
Creativity in Education: A Conundrum
Applying the Space–Time Continuum to Education
Mapping Pedagogies on the Space–Time Continuum
Conclusion: Balancing Pedagogies in the Space–Time Continuum
References
5 Cultivating Creativity in Computing Education: A Missed Opportunity?
Introduction
Background
The Subject “Technology Comprehension” in Denmark
Creativity in Education
Method
Analysis
Creativity in Students’ Cognitive Skills, the Design Process, and in the New Digital Solution
Creativity as a Prerequisite for Learning and as a Learning Outcome in Itself
Creativity as a Monodisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Endeavor
Creativity as an Individual and Collective Phenomenon
Creativity as an Unleashed Potential in Technology and as a Design Solution
Discussion
Creativity Is Integral to the Danish Technology Comprehension Subject
Articulations of Creativity in the Technology Comprehension Subject Appear Contradictory and Inconsistent
Closing Remarks
References
6 Multiple Creativities Put to Work for Creative Ecologies in Teacher Professional Learning: A Vision and Practice of Everyday Creativity
Introduction
Framing and Operationalizing Creativities Theory-Into-Practice
An Ecological Framework for Diverse Creativities
“Everyday Creativity”: An International Collaborative Effort to Boost Schools’ Creative Resources with Finnish Models of Education
Creative Ecological Dimensions of the Finnish National Core Curriculum (2014)
Developing a Research-Based Blended Course in Multi-stakeholder Co-creation
Course Content, Structure, and Organization
Approaches to an Ecology of Diverse Creativities: An Analysis of Teachers’ Accounts with the Renewal of Learning Environments in Focus
Discussion and Conclusion: “Everyday Creativity” in Teacher Professional Learning
References
7 Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in a Teacher Training School’s Change Laboratory
Introduction
Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning
Study
Research Setting
Data Collection
Data Analysis
Findings: Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in the Change Laboratory
Interaction Episode 1: Searching for the Shared Object of the Collective Activity
Interaction Episode 2: Envisioning a Dynamic Team Model for Pedagogical Collaboration
Interaction Episode 3: Inventing a Dynamic Model for Pedagogical Leadership
Discussion and Conclusion
References
8 Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning
Introduction
RealGame as an Environment for Fostering Collaborative Learning and Creativity
Method
Collaborative Creativity and Learning in the Participants’ RealGame Experiences
Discussion
References
9 Mind the Gap: Creative Knowledge Processes Within Interdisciplinary Groups in Organizations and Higher Education
Introduction
How to Understand Creativity and Learning as Creative Knowledge Processes
From individual Creativity to Creativity as a Social Act
Polyphony as a Sociocultural Approach to Understanding Creative Knowledge Processes
A Study on Interdisciplinary Groups
Three Research Groups in Organizations
Results
Transferring the Results to Student Groups in Higher Education
The Importance of Openness, Respect, Psychological Safety, and Trust in the Groups
Concluding Remarks
References
10 Remaking and Transforming Cultural Practices: Exploring the Co-occurrence of Work, Learning, Innovation
Introduction
Promoting Innovations and Learning at Work
Explanatory Orientation
Investigating How Innovations Are Initiated, Enacted, Supported, and Rewarded in Workplaces
Initiating, Enacting, Supporting and Rewarding Innovations
Initiating Workplace Innovations
Enacting Workplace Innovations
Supporting Innovations in the Workplace
Rewards for Innovation
Work and Innovation: Discussion
Importance of Workers’ Engagement
Proximity to Managers and Workers
References
11 Supporting Creativity and Learning at Work: Practices and Structures from Growth Companies
Introduction
Creativity and Learning in Working Life
Practices and Structures Supporting Creativity and Learning—A Focus on HRM
Aims, Questions and Sub-studies of the HeRMo Project
Methodology and Data
Mixed Methods and Ethnographic Approaches
Data
Analysis
Summary of the Main Findings of the Sub-studies of the HeRMo Project
Four Main Conclusions from the HeRMo Project
Creativity and Learning Are Collective and Informal Phenomena at Work
A Variety of Structures and Practices Enable Creativity and Learning at Work
Equality and Employee Orientation in Structures and Practices Are Important
A Context-Specific Examination of Creativity, Learning and Supporting Practices Is Needed
Closing Thoughts
References
Correction to: Creativity and Learning
Correction to: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2
Correction to: Creativity and Learning
Correction to: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2
Correction to: Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning
Correction to: Chapter 8 in: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_8
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CREATIVITY AND CULTURE

Creativity and Learning Contexts, Processes and Support Edited by Soila Lemmetty · Kaija Collin Vlad Petre Glăveanu · Panu Forsman

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture

Series Editors ˘ Department of Psychology and Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Counselling, Webster University Geneva, Bellevue, Geneva, Switzerland; Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway Brady Wagoner , Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Both creativity and culture are areas that have experienced a rapid growth in interest in recent years. Moreover, there is a growing interest today in understanding creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon and culture as a transformative, dynamic process. Creativity has traditionally been considered an exceptional quality that only a few people (truly) possess, a cognitive or personality trait ‘residing’ inside the mind of the creative individual. Conversely, culture has often been seen as ‘outside’ the person and described as a set of ‘things’ such as norms, beliefs, values, objects, and so on. The current literature shows a trend towards a different understanding, which recognises the psycho-socio-cultural nature of creative expression and the creative quality of appropriating and participating in culture. Our new, interdisciplinary series Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture intends to advance our knowledge of both creativity and cultural studies from the forefront of theory and research within the emerging cultural psychology of creativity, and the intersection between psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, business, and cultural studies. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture is accepting proposals for monographs, Palgrave Pivots and edited collections that bring together creativity and culture. The series has a broader focus than simply the cultural approach to creativity, and is unified by a basic set of premises about creativity and cultural phenomena.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14640

Soila Lemmetty · Kaija Collin · ˘ Vlad Petre Glaveanu · Panu Forsman Editors

Creativity and Learning Contexts, Processes and Support

Editors Soila Lemmetty Department of Education University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu Department of Psychology and Counselling Webster University Geneva Bellevue, Geneva, Switzerland

Kaija Collin Department of Education University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland Panu Forsman Faculty of Education and Psychology University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland

Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology University of Bergen Bergen, Norway

Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-77065-5 ISBN 978-3-030-77066-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021, 2022, 2023 Chapters 1, 6 and 8 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Henrik Sorensen/getty images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

In January 2020, Google returned nearly 350 million hits for the keywords “creativity and learning”. It is not surprising, as we already know that creativity and learning are two topics that have been widely studied and written about. At the top of the hit list was a reference to Beth A. Hennessey and Theresa M. Amabile’s (1987) pamphlet called Creativity and Learning. What Research Says to the Teacher. This publication includes a large amount of already familiar but interesting and still topical information about creativity and learning. The pamphlet begins with the story of Albert Einstein, a quiet and shy child who performed poorly in school. According to the story, Einstein was not admitted to the Polytechnic Institution in Zurich for which he was aiming; instead, he was accepted in another Swiss school for a remedial course. According to the piece, this proved to be a turning point in Einstein’s life; the new school’s humanistic atmosphere, practical laboratory work, and student-oriented culture fit well with him. Thanks to these advantages, his creativity was unleashed, and well, the rest is history. In addition to this Einstein example, the pamphlet includes a section entitled, “How to kill creativity”. In this section, Hennessey and

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Amabile discuss the ways in which teachers can either support or limit the creativity of the learner—in this case, the child. It has now been 34 years since the publication of that work, but its content conveys, in part, the same message as that of our current book, Creativity and Learning: Contexts, Processes and Support. Whereas Hennessey and Amabile (1987) highlight the factors that inhibit students’ motivation and creativity, factors that educators routinely sometimes apply in schools, we intend to emphasise the forms and manifestations of creativity and learning in different contexts, focusing on how these manifestations can be enabled. However, the starting point for both us and them is the idea that the creative activity and learning of individuals and communities can be viewed as sociocultural phenomena, constructed and defined in situational and context-specific terms, in the interaction between different actors and their environment. The idea behind this book was first hatched at the Department of Education of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in the final days of a recent research project, as we were searching for information on the relation between creativity and learning in various fields. We obtained a lot of research articles on the connections between creativity and learning but could not find a more comprehensive work with the research on the topic conducted in different contexts. Due to this observation, we decided to bring together researchers of creativity and learning from different countries and disciplines and to compile articles for a book on learning and creativity that showcases the different contexts of the 2020s. When the book project started in Geneva in January 2020, we did not know then what that year would mean to us as editors and writers—how many more reflections about creativity and learning we would engage in! The writing work has been both overshadowed and nurtured by the coronavirus pandemic. From the perspective of creativity and learning, the pandemic has provided new, interesting ideas that this book’s contributors also help to analyse and to structure. During that time, we have gained a new understanding, not only about the effects of change and uncertainty and their impacts on creativity and learning, but also about the importance of collaboration and shared objectives in moving forward and solving problems.

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This book’s contributors examine the relations between and support for creativity and learning in the areas of children’s education, adult learning, as well as workplace learning and organisational development. The writers introduce concepts and descriptions of these phenomena and their cultivation, based on not only theoretical models and research, but also practical experience. Needless to say, what made it possible to compile this diverse, impressive and interesting work was the help of a knowledgeable and cooperative group of authors. We express our sincere thanks to all who have contributed to this book for their time, effort and valuable insights. Jyväskylä, Finland Jyväskylä, Finland Geneva, Switzerland Jyväskylä, Finland March 2021

Soila Lemmetty Kaija Collin Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu Panu Forsman

The original version of the book was revised: Second affiliation has been included for the author and series editor (Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu) in FM, Chapters 1 and 11. The correction to the book is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_12

Contents

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Introduction: Creativity and Learning as Sociocultural and Intertwined Phenomena Soila Lemmetty, Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu, Panu Forsman, and Kaija Collin

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Uncertainty: A Necessary Condition for Creative Learning Ronald A. Beghetto

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Time to Think: Lessons about Purpose and Agency from Case Studies Michael Hanchett Hanson and Ana Jorge-Artigau

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Developing Intelligence and Creativity in Education: Insights from the Space–Time Continuum Giovanni Emanuele Corazza, Frédéric Darbellay, Todd Lubart, and Chiara Panciroli

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Cultivating Creativity in Computing Education: A Missed Opportunity? Michael Mose Biskjaer, Ole Sejer Iversen, and Christian Dindler

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Multiple Creativities Put to Work for Creative Ecologies in Teacher Professional Learning: A Vision and Practice of Everyday Creativity Tamás Péter Szabó, Pamela Burnard, Anne Harris, Kristóf Fenyvesi, Gomathy Soundararaj, and Tea Kangasvieri

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Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in a Teacher Training School’s Change Laboratory Sakari Hyrkkö and Anu Kajamaa

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Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning Ari Tuhkala, Kirsi Syynimaa, Kirsi Lainema, Joni Lämsä, Timo Lainema, and Raija Hämäläinen

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Mind the Gap: Creative Knowledge Processes Within Interdisciplinary Groups in Organizations and Higher Education Ingunn Johanne Ness Remaking and Transforming Cultural Practices: Exploring the Co-occurrence of Work, Learning, Innovation Stephen Billett, Silin Yang, Arthur Chia, Jo Fang Tai, Millie Lee, and Sha Alhadad

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Supporting Creativity and Learning at Work: Practices and Structures from Growth Companies Kaija Collin, Soila Lemmetty, Panu Forsman, Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu, Tommi Auvinen, Elina Riivari, Sara Keronen, and Marianne Jaakkola

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Correction to: Creativity and Learning Soila Lemmetty, Kaija Collin, Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu, and Panu Forsman

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Correction to: Creativity and Learning Soila Lemmetty, Kaija Collin, Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu, and Panu Forsman

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Correction to: Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning Ari Tuhkala, Kirsi Syynimaa, Kirsi Lainema, Joni Lämsä, Timo Lainema, and Raija Hämäläinen Index

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Notes on Contributors

Sha Alhadad currently completing Masters degree with the Southeast Asian Studies Department in the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interests lie in the intersections of Islam, feminism, and race. Tommi Auvinen, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer and leading researcher in Management and Leadership at the Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics (JSBE), Finland and a docent in narrative leadership research at the University of Lapland. His research focuses on leadership themes, such as storytelling and discursive power, and strategy-as-practice. Auvinen has published over 30 refereed journal articles—including Journal of Management Learning, Accounting and Business Research and Journal of Business Ethics—and book chapters published by such esteemed institutions as Routledge and Springer. Ronald A. Beghetto, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized expert on creative thought and action in educational settings. He is the Pinnacle West Presidential Chair and Professor for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Dr. Beghetto is the Editor for the

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Journal of Creative Behavior, Book Series Editor for Creative Theory and Action in Education, a Creativity Advisor for the LEGO foundation. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts and a Fellow of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation. Prior to joining the faculty at ASU, Dr. Beghetto served as Professor and Director of Innovation House and the University of Connecticut. More information about Ron Beghetto can be found at www.ronaldbeghetto.com. Stephen Billett is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland Australia. His research interest are in learning the capacities required for paid work, through experiences in and across working life, educational institutions and their integration. Michael Mose Biskjaer is an Assistant Professor of Digital Design at Aarhus University. By combining digital design, creativity, and innovation research, he adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to explore both theoretically and empirically the impact of digitization on various creative practices. Among his main research interests are constraints, ideation, collaboration, and inspiration in, as well as new management methods for, creative design processes. Pamela Burnard is Professor of Arts, Creativities, and Educations at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge where she Chairs the Arts and Creativities Research Group and runs an online monthly seminar series called “Performing Research.” She has published widely with 20 books and over 100 articles which advance the theory of multiple creativities across education sectors including early years, primary, secondary, further, and higher education, through to creative and cultural industries. She is co-editor of the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity. Arthur Chia is a researcher at the Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences. His research interests include work and learning in social and economic contexts. Kaija Collin is an Associate Professor, Ph.D., works at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of Education, Finland. Her research interests

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focus on workplace and organizational learning, professional identity and agency, inter-professional work practices, creativity and leadership and professional development and HRD in various organizational contexts (technical knowledge work and hospitals) mainly with the help of qualitative methodology. Collin has widely published internationally and nationally. She also has wide experience as a reviewer and editor in the journals in the fields of adult education, HRD, leadership and workplace learning. She also has a long experience in supervising master and doctoral students. Giovanni Emanuele Corazza is a Full Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, President of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi, founder of the Marconi Institute for Creativity, Member of the Marconi Society Board of Directors. His research interests are focused on the development of the Dynamic Creativity Framework. The Marconi Institute for Creativity (MIC), a joint initiative of the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi and of the University of Bologna, was founded in 2011 with the purpose of establishing creative thinking as a science. The three pillars upon which MIC operates are those of scientific research, education activities, and support to the process of creativity and innovation. http://mic.fgm.it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= bEusrD8g-dM. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6898-4515. Frédéric Darbellay is an Associate Professor in Inter- and Transdisciplinary Studies at the University of Geneva and Head of the Interand Transdisciplinarity Unit at the Centre for Children’s Rights Studies (CIDE). His research and teaching focuses on the study of interand transdisciplinarity as a creative process of knowledge production between and beyond disciplines. He authored multiple publications on the theory and practice of inter- and transdisciplinarity through various scientific fields, across Arts, Humanities, Social, Natural, Life, and Technical Sciences. Frédéric Darbellay is membre of the Td-net (Network for Transdisciplinary Research) Scientific Advisory Board of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) Board of Directors. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-00031321-7105.

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Christian Dindler is an Associate Professor of Participatory Interaction Design at Aarhus University. In his research, Christian explores how digital technology is designed and the effects that interaction design processes have on individuals and organizations. He has worked with interaction design research and practice in a range of domains, from schools and libraries to public space and in commercial settings. Christian took part in developing the Danish national curriculum on Technology Comprehension for 1st–9th grade education. Kristóf Fenyvesi is a researcher of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics), trans- and multidisciplinary learning and contemporary cultural studies at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is a member of the Research Group for Innovative Learning Environments and the Research Group for Education, Assessment & Learning. Fenyvesi is the Community Events Director of the Bridges Organization, the world’s largest education community for the mathematics and the arts. He has been the local coordinator of several international research projects in the fields of multidisciplinary, digital and hands-on learning, hybrid education, computational thinking, and creative problem-solving. Panu Forsman works as a University Teacher at the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä. He is dividing his time between International Master Degree Programme in Educational Sciences and Institute of Educational Leadership working with both degree students and professional trainings. His key teaching and research interests range from professional agency and creativity to digital and pedagogical development in education and educational leadership. Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology and Counselling at Webster University Geneva, founder and Director of the Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation (WCCI) and Associate Professor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen. His work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, and societal challenges. He has edited and published books and journal articles extensively. He co-edits the book series Palgrave Studies in Creativity

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and Culture for Palgrave Macmillan. Vlad is editor of Europe’s Journal of Psychology (EJOP), an open-access peer-reviewed journal published by PsychOpen (Germany). He received in 2018 the Berlyne Award from the American Psychological Association for outstanding early career contributions to the field of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. Professor Raija Hämäläinen leads the Technology Enhanced Learning research group. Her research interests include collaboration and creativity at the technology-enhanced learning settings, workplace-learning, and teacher–student interaction. She has participated in one publication that has defined the research area of collaboration scripts, and it has become one of the standard references in such an area. She has designed a long-term research line that focuses on designing and investigating new learning environments for future educational efforts. Michael Hanchett Hanson is a developmental psychologist; Director of the Masters Concentration in Creativity and Cognition at Teachers College, Columbia University; a founding member and Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI); and President of Contexts R+D, a research and consulting practice. He conducts research on lifelong creative development, including schoolbased and community-based programs in the arts, youth development and general education. Dr. Hanchett Hanson received his B.A. in architecture from Yale University and his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University. Anne Harris (they/them) is a Professor and Associate Dean, Research & Innovation, in the School of Education at RMIT University. They are also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and Director of Creative Agency research lab. Harris is editor of the book series Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave), has authored over 100 articles/book chapters, 17 books, plays, films and spoken word performances exploring gender, sexuality, performance, creativity and kinship, the latest of which is Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, co-edited with Stacy Holman Jones). Sakari Hyrkkö is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests lie

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in collective and interpersonal structures of organizational activity, creativity, interaction, learning, and leadership, as well as CulturalHistorical Activity Theory (CHAT) and its applications. He is also a member of the faculty’s Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) expert research group. Ole Sejer Iversen is a Professor of Interaction Design and director of Center for Computational Thinking and Design at Aarhus University. His research lies at the intersection of Interaction Design and ChildComputer Interaction with a special interest in participatory practices that support children’s digital empowerment. In 2018, professor Iversen was appointed by the Ministry of Education to co-chair the expert group, who developed the curriculum for Computing Education in 1st–9th grade education in Denmark. Marianne Jaakkola holds an M.A. in Adult Education and is currently a Ph.D. student in the School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where she also works as a researcher in the Department of Education. A qualified teacher with a multicultural outlook, she is further employed as a part-time lecturer with Jyväskylä Open University. Her research is focussed on management, leadership, organisational hierarchy, workplace climate, creativity, and learning. Ana Jorge-Artigau is a Doctor in Communication from Austral University in Argentina where she currently works. Her area of interest is the intersection between Communication and Creativity. She studied with and worked for Eliseo Verón for several years. Her thesis was a case study about his contribution to the field. Her current research interest and teaching courses focus on a more critical perspective of creativity that seeks to understand the time that it takes to think and the detours that journey implies. Anu Kajamaa is an Associate Professor and is co-leader of the Learning, Culture and Interventions (LECI) research community at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses especially on collective learning, creativity, organization, management, change, and development. She is an expert in sociocultural-

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and practice-based theories, qualitative research methods and participatory intervention techniques, drawing especially from cultural historical activity theory and the Change Laboratory method. She has conducted collaborative research and intervention projects in schools, teacher education, prison services, health care and entrepreneurship contexts and published in international journals. Tea Kangasvieri, M.A. is a project researcher and coordinator in a development project for language education called Map and Compass for Innovative Language Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. One of the main aims of the project is to map and develop good practices of Finnish language educators in early childhood education and basic education (grades 1-9). The project also aims to support language educators’ creativity and innovativeness in their own school and day care contexts. Sara Keronen, M.A. is a doctoral student at the Department of Education of the University of Jyväskylä. In her research, in the field of adult education, she examines self-directed and autonomous learning in different work contexts. Keronen has worked at the University of Jyväskylä as a project researcher and educational coordinator. She is currently working at the University of Eastern Finland as a HR secretary. Kirsi Lainema, Ph.D. (Econ.) studies interaction and organizing and the use of technology in digital learning and work environments. Her research covers topics and contexts such as managerial work, networked businesses, strategic practices, medical contexts, and digital learning and working environments. Lainema’s interests lie particularly in studying collaborative learning and interactional processes at work. Currently, Lainema works in Well@DigiWork research group. Timo Lainema, Ph.D. (Econ.) has applied simulation games in business education, university teaching, executive education, and in-house management training programs. His research interests are learning through gaming, conceptual change, knowledge sharing in virtual working contexts, and dynamic decision making in time intensive environments. He holds an Adjunct Professorship in Education in University

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of Turku, and in Information Research and Interactive Media in University of Tampere, and is Senior Fellow in Turku School of Economics. Joni Lämsä, Ph.D. works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Education at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include learning and interaction in various technology-enhanced contexts. Lämsä has particularly focused on computer-supported collaborative learning and how to analyse and understand temporal aspects of these learning processes with novel methodological approaches. Millie Lee is a research assistant and adult educator at the Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her research interests are work and learning, motivation, inequality, and social mobility. Soila Lemmetty, Ph.D. works at the Department of Education of the University of Jyväskylä and at Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics (JSBE) as a researcher and research coordinator. Her research interests include workplace learning, competence development, creativity and innovations in an organizational context, and managing learning and wellbeing in different workplaces. She has published internationally and nationally in journals and books on adult education and working life research. Lemmetty is a Junior Member of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI). In JSBE she is involved in the ETHOS research group. She has also worked in the knowledge-based company as a competence development and learning specialist, and at the Institute of Educational Leadership as an educational coordinator. Todd Lubart is Professor of Psychology at the Université de Paris (LaPEA lab). Over the past 30 years, he is the author of books, articles and book chapters about creativity. Also, he co-authored measures of creative potential in children (EPoC: Evaluation of Potential Creativity) and adults. Todd Lubart received awards for his work on creativity including the American Psychological Association, World Council of Gifted and Talented, International Center for Innovation in Education. He directed a research laboratory focused on individual differences, human potential and applied psychology, and has been responsible for

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several large-scale research grants, including work on creativity assessment, creative development, creative process, and creative environments Currently, Todd Lubart is president of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation ( issci.online). ORCID: https://orcid. org/0000-0002-8776-8797. Dr. Ingunn Johanne Ness is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen. Ness carries out research on interdisciplinarity, innovation, and creativity in both education and work settings. Her research is grounded in a socio-cultural theoretical tradition and she works with one of the world’s leading environments on sociocultural theory, the OSAT group at the Department of Education, University of Oxford and has close collaboration with Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation in Geneva. She has a number of publications in International journals and Handbooks. Chiara Panciroli is a Full Professor in the Department of Education, University of Bologna. She teaches General didactics and Technologies of Education. She is referent of the scientific unit “AI and Education” of Alma Mater Research Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; scientific responsible of the MOdE—Museum of Education— University Museum System; member of the International Research Committee UMAC—University Museums and Collections (ICOMUNESCO). She directs the IMG journal, interdisciplinary scientific publication on images, imagery, and imagination. Her main research topics concern Innovative teaching in digital environments, Learning analytics systems, Graphic-visual learning, Art education and Digital cultural heritage. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7173-670X. Elina Riivari, Ph.D. (Econ.), M.A. is University Teacher in management and leadership and Pedagogical Director at the University of Jyväskylä, School of Business and Economics, Finland. Her main research interests include ethics, innovativeness, and creativity in organizations. Gomathy Soundararaj, M.A. is an Educational Lead at New Nordic School, Finland. She acts as a bridge between the Finnish and Indian education systems, by localising and implementing the New Nordic

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School educational system with Indian partner schools. She is actively involved in instructional design and content creation of professional development courses and programs for both on-site and online implementation. She started her journey as a Teach For India fellow and as a graduate student at University of Jyväskyla, she immersed into the Finnish educational system and intensively researched teacher training and pedagogy. Kirsi Syynimaa, M.Ed. is a project researcher in the Department of Education and Finnish Institute for Educational Research. She has an extensive experience working with development and research projects in the field of technology-enhanced teaching and learning at the University of Jyväskylä, since 2004. Prior to her current position she worked for a Finnish Work Environment Fund supported project Well@DigiWork. She is also doing her Ph.D. studies and her field of research is Teachers’ and students’ views on technology-enhanced learning. Tamás Péter Szabó is a senior researcher of Multilingualism and Adjunct Professor (Docent) of Linguistic Landscape Studies in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published extensively about multilingual and language aware pedagogies, schoolscape studies and creative education. He has co-developed several courses and study modules for pre- and in-service teacher education, and carried out collaborative research and development projects in education. Currently Szabó is Scientific Manager coordinating seven international, challenge-driven, multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder expert networks called FORTHEM Labs within the FORTHEM European Universities Alliance, and leads the Multilingualism in School and Higher Education Lab. Jo Fang Tai is Principal Manager of Skillsfuture Singapore, currently overseeing quality management of courses. Ari Tuhkala has a Ph.D. in computer science (educational technology) and his dissertation examined participatory design as an approach for involving teachers as design partners. His background combines computer science, educational sciences, and social sciences. His main research interests are learner-technology interaction, research

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through design methodology, and literature mining using computational methods. He has completed teacher’s pedagogical studies and taught software development related topics. Silin Yang is an Assistant Director (Strategy) of National Trades Union Congress, Singapore. Her research interests are future of work, workplace and workforce, upward mobility of workers, and adult learning.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1

Uncertainty in creative learning Gruber’s network of enterprise Mapping Intelligence and Creativity over the ST-Continuum (from Corazza & Lubart, 2021) Creative ecologies (Adapted from Harris, 2016, 2017) Theoretical framework for this study with assemblage of the macro-meso creative ecologies and micro pluralism of diverse creativities Photograph of the first version of the new model, drawn by the teachers Photograph of “the doughnut model” initiated by senior teacher ST6 Photograph of further iterations of the model drawn by NT1 (left) and ST5 (right) RealGame user interface Model: The room of opportunity (Ness & Søreide, 2014, p. 557)

28 49

75 120

122 161 163 166 181 213

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 4.1 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 7.1 Table 9.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4

Leveraging uncertainty in instructional activities and assessment tasks Main correlates to the development of the intelligence and creativity constructs The structure of the intensive training week in Jyväskylä Narratives on the transformation of learning environments An overview of follow-up projects Duration, speaking turns and attendees at the Change Laboratory meetings Description of groups Who or what was important in initiating workplace innovations Who or what was important in engaging in innovations in the workplace Who or what was important in supporting innovations in the workplace Who or what was important in rewarding innovations in the workplace

35 73 128 133 136 154 205 229 229 230 230

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Table 11.1 Table 11.2

List of Tables

Sub-studies and research questions Data and findings of the HeRMo project

253 257

1 Introduction: Creativity and Learning as Sociocultural and Intertwined Phenomena ˘ Soila Lemmetty, Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Panu Forsman, and Kaija Collin The importance of creativity and learning cannot be overestimated in education, in working life, and in society at large. In recent years, educators and employers alike have highlighted creativity and learning as some of the most significant phenomena in a constantly changing world.1 The requirements for competence, expertise and innovation in various fields of life are so high that the individual’s chances of 1

In fact, the OECD’s list of the top 10 job skills for 2025 include analytical thinking and innovation (1), active learning and learning strategies (2), and creativity, originality and initiative (4). More details can be found here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-workskills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them/.

The original version of this chapter was revised: Second affiliation has been included for the author (Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu). The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_12 The original version of this chapter was previously published non-open access. A Correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_13

S. Lemmetty (B) · K. Collin Department of Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2021, 2022 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_1

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meeting the requirements independently are negligible. For this reason, the skills associated with cooperation and thus, with acquiring an expanded understanding of different perspectives, are particularly relevant (Hmelo-Silver et al., 2013). In complex environments, problem solving and the development of new inventions that require deep and continuous learning and creativity are commonplace. Creativity and learning have also been found to have similar dynamics and to support each other across domains. Studies have shown that they are strongly intertwined and mutually reinforcing (e.g., Karwowski et al., 2020). From the perspective of sociocultural theories, both creativity and learning emerge from interactions among individuals, other people, and the environment (Gl˘aveanu et al., 2019). What does creativity mean? Even in the scientific literature, there is no final or universal answer to this question. However, many descriptions of creativity have been recognized by those working in creativity research. Runco and Jaeger (2012) have traced the historical roots of the “standard” definition of creativity, which states that creativity includes two main criteria: originality and effectiveness. The first criterion refers to the novelty and uniqueness of the creative product. The latter criterion pertains to the product’s value and usability. In some definitions, surprise and intentionality have also been mentioned as essential (e.g., Simonton, 2018; Weisberg, 2015). Much of the essence of creativity depends on the context and the requirements; in art, the demand for novelty is often K. Collin e-mail: [email protected] V. P. Gl˘aveanu Department of Psychology and Counselling, Webster University Geneva, Bellevue, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway P. Forsman Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

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emphasized, while in organizations, effectiveness and added value are essential (Puccio & Cabra, 2010). In terms of usefulness, the new and creative outcome should be sensible and socially relevant (Runco, 2003; Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Several theoretical models of creativity have been presented (Gl˘aveanu, 2015; Lubart, 2017; Simonton, 2018), which provide tools for examining the phenomenon from different perspectives. The essential “components” of these models are the individual or creative actors, acts or practices, the environment and the outcome (e.g., Gl˘aveanu, 2015; Lubart, 2017). One of the major challenges faced by creativity researchers involves the difficulty in studying creative expression in a systemic and developmental manner, as the action of an “entire” person, situated in an evolving network of relations (Gruber, 1988), instead of situating the whole dynamic in the individual’s mind. This is largely due to a longer history of considering creativity a personal quality and the trait that distinguishes an individual the most from others. However, a closer look at how people create in practice reveals the importance of interaction and co-creation. As noted by Barron years ago, all creativity is collaboration (1999), a statement meant to bring to the fore the fact that even solitary moments of creativity are never asocial in nature. We always depend on other people, other perspectives and tools to generate novel and meaningful outcomes, from ideas to the most visible creative achievements. A comprehensive theory of creativity thus requires us to perceive at “persons in context” rather than as isolated creators, as well as to bring to the fore their embedding in a world of objects and of others who are part and parcel of creative acts. Similar to creativity, learning has been described in a number of ways; over the decades, different definitions and approaches to learning have emerged. In general, learning can be considered as referring to a process that produces a relatively stable change in persons (see e.g., Alexander et al., 2009). Learning is normally defined as the internalization and control of knowledge and skills, the formation of a new understanding and the development of competence. As in research on creativity, the area of learning has focused on learners and their abilities and activities, on the progress and practices of learning processes, and on learning outcomes. When reflecting on the key learning theories, from behaviorism and cognitivism to constructivist approaches, it becomes clear

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that the latter have had a huge impact on how we define knowledge and learning (e.g., Ermer & Newby, 1993, 2013; Loyens & Gijbels, 2008; Tynjälä, 1999). On this basis, for example, the concept of collaborative learning (see Dillenbourg, 1999) has emerged, which refers to shared learning processes, joint learning activities, such as goal setting and the construction of knowledge among group members. Appreciating and consulting all group members about their views, as well as joint dialogue, lie at the heart of collaborative learning. On one hand, the existing literature focusing on the links between creativity and learning has focused primarily on examining both as separate phenomena, with a view to finding differences or similarities between them. On the other hand, the phenomena have also been approached together, for example, through the concept of creative learning (Gajda et al., 2017). Indeed, in the past, the relation between creativity and learning has been more prominently attached to formal contexts, such as the classroom (basic and higher education). However, it still seems that in formal education, creative pedagogies need to be further developed, producing an overarching synthesis that encompasses both creativity and learning (Cremin & Chappell, 2019). Much of the potential of creativity and learning to transform everyday life (e.g., problem solving, creating something new, coping with life, or producing innovative outcomes) has been overlooked. However, research on creativity and learning as intertwined phenomena in different life contexts is central to increasing our understanding of both and developing context-specific practices (see e.g., Anderson et al., 2014). Additionally, different methodologies need to be developed in order to study the diversity of creativity and learning across contexts so as to understand their sub-processes and reach a more dynamic conceptualization of their manifestation rather than a general statistical understanding (e.g., Said-Metwaly et al., 2017). The constant development of technologies, the unpredictability of the future, and rapid processes of globalization have created the need to gain a better understanding of the nature of creativity and learning as co-occurring processes, as well as to develop ways of supporting them in different applied contexts. To address this need, this book’s contributors approach creativity and learning as (a) sociocultural phenomena and (b) interdependent processes. Next, we

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briefly present the building blocks of creativity and learning for a sociocultural examination of both as intertwining phenomena. In addition, we will discuss the usefulness of this approach.

Sociocultural Perspective for Creativity and Learning Creativity and learning are strongly interconnected in people’s daily lives in a global society, whenever we are faced with small or large problems, in situations of interaction and in new, often digital environments. It matters how we understand and approach these phenomena in research and practice, as our approach strongly determines the opportunities (and challenges) that arise for the realization of creativity and learning. Creativity and learning have long been perceived as individual-driven processes, although new information about their sociocultural nature has emerged in recent decades, transforming our view of both (e.g., Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008; Gl˘aveanu, 2015; Wenger, 2009). To cite a concrete example, constructivism has established itself as the dominant educational theory in one way or another (Ertmer & Newby, 2013), and it shares a lot of premises with sociocultural approaches. The main premise remains, that is, learning and creativity do not take place in a vacuum; both are the results of sociomaterial situations and therefore, strongly supported by factors outside the individual. If we study creativity and learning from a narrow individualistic perspective, understanding it as only emerging from and thriving in our minds and in us as people, we limit the possibilities offered to us by the environment. The sociocultural perspective on creativity and learning utilized in this book does not exclude the importance of the individual’s mind, agency or action for the whole construct, but it provides a broader, more multidimensional and evolving perspective for examining creativity and learning (Gl˘aveanu et al., 2015; John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996). The sociocultural tradition in these areas has often relied on the theoretical views of Lev Vygotsky (1978) and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1996). These describe creativity and learning as whole processes arising from the interactions among the individual, the community and the

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broader cultural environment. Indicating the differences and the relations between the individual and the social field is therefore useful for understanding the dynamic nature of creativity and learning in specific contexts. From a sociocultural perspective, creativity thrives in a collaborative environment (Moran & John-Steiner, 2003) and can be viewed as an event that occurs within a group when its members’different ideas are brought together (Sawyer, 2012). At the level of societal debate, creativity has been highlighted as one of the main strengths in meeting the challenges of change and renewal (see e.g., Amabile & Khaire, 2008; Florida & Goodnight, 2005). Creativity and learning manifest themselves as part of the social activities of many different groups and occur in many areas of life, industries, or organizations (Craft, 2008; Miell & Littleton, 2004; Perry-Smith, 2006; Shalley & Perry-Smith, 2008). At the same time, both phenomena are context-dependent and focused on different issues in various situations and environments. The importance of context is thus paramount. The sociocultural approach is a broad, heterogeneous orientation under which we can find several different theoretical lenses used to examine creativity and learning. These range from pragmatism (e.g., Dewey, 1993) to cultural-historical and activity theories (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978) and the dialogical theory (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981). Each of these ultimately studies creativity as an ecology that includes actors, actions, audiences, artefacts, and affordances (Gl˘aveanu, 2013). We can thus focus our attention on acts that bear the mark of creativity and learning, as well as the roles of actors in creative (inter)action. We can investigate the outcomes of creativity by asking what value they bring to the community in which the creative learner works or to the society where he or she lives. We can broaden our perspective by positioning ourselves in the situation of another person or group and engaging in perspectivetaking. Because creativity and learning often produce useful meanings for individuals, communities or societies, sociocultural approaches also encourage us to understand the importance of supporting creativity and learning from the “outside.” The most typical and common descriptions of supporting creativity and learning are often related to the culture of the operating environment, for instance, characteristics such as climate, guidance, and autonomy (see e.g., Lemmetty, 2020).

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In summary, the sociocultural premise brings to our attention the different contexts, environments, and platforms in which creativity and learning take place. It highlights the roles and practices of different actors in the processes of creativity and learning. The sociocultural approach also provides an opportunity to step outside the individual and observe the forms of support that enable learning and creativity in the environment: teaching methods, leadership culture, or group activity structures. At the same time, it would be good to remember the statement of Billett et al. (this volume): “There is nothing more social than individuals (e.g., workers), whose understandings, practices and values arise through their engagement and negotiation with what is experienced socially, albeit in personally idiosyncratic ways, across their life histories.”

Creativity and Learning as Intertwined Phenomena According to the late professor, Anna Craft (2005, p. 53), “It seems that’creativity’ and’learning’ are not distinguishable if we take a constructivist approach to learning, unless we take a harder line on what counts as’original and’of value.’” Indeed, currently, creativity and learning are increasingly clearly equated, especially when viewed as collective or social phenomena (Craft et al., 2007; Jeffrey & Craft, 2004). According to Beghetto (2016, p. 4), creative learning has been defined as a “combination of intrapsychological and interpsychological processes that result in new and personally meaningful understandings for oneself and others.” Problem solving and the related process appear to be key features of creativity (e.g., Collin et al., 2017); at the same time, they have been said to expand knowledge and expertise (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). Operational challenges and problem situations thus serve as resources for continuous learning (Watkins & Marsick, 1993). The process of creative activity is closely related to the actors’ competence and previous knowledge (see Runco, 2015; Simonton, 2012), which in turn are closely associated with learning. Obviously, the role of learning in creative activity is relevant. According to Lemmetty and Collin (2020), the processes of

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creative activity should be approached and studied as learning. Similarly, learning should be perceived as a creative activity. Biskjaer et al. (this volume) elaborate this point when it comes to curriculum and classroom activities through twofold demands and conceptualizations of creativity—one as a prerequisite for learning, the other as a learning outcome—especially when addressing collaborative learning. Indeed, many researchers have combined creativity, learning and expertise when examining different creative processes. For instance, Ness and Soreide (2014) have studied the progress of knowledge construction processes in group situations. The researchers have observed that the creative process begins with detecting the need to develop something new. It is helpful if the participants have previous knowledge about and skills relevant for the topic. Through this previous knowledge base, a new shared understanding can be constructed in dialogue. Thus, at the heart of the creative process is the shared knowledge through which the ideas are developed and finally exercised (Ness & Soreide, 2014). Ness (this volume) continues this approach by addressing creative knowledge processes, used as a bridge between creativity and learning, elaborating idea development through both collective and individual efforts. Lemmetty and Collin (2020) have found that the process of creative activity includes learning practices that appear to be prerequisites for the transition from process to progress. These practices are related to the learner’s activities, such as setting a learning goal, designing learning methods, applying what has been learned and evaluating the outcome. Accordingly, it is easy to agree with Beghetto’s (2016) view that creativity plays an important role in learning. He suggests that creativity researchers and educational scholars have long asserted that theories of learning need to be broadened to include creative cognition, but the nature of that role is not clear yet (i.e., the way it articulates acquiring and creating knowledge).

Focus, Purpose, and Contents of the Book This book, Creativity and Learning: Contexts, Processes, and Support, focuses on the relations and connections between creativity and learning.

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The focus is broad, from basic education to the learning emerging in workplaces. In the chapters of this book, the writers examine sociocultural definitions of creativity and learning in the contexts of children’s education and adult education, as well as workplaces and organizations, making visible the differences and the similarities across settings. By shifting the focus from individual psychology to a sociocultural framework, we become more firmly attached to the multidimensional nature of the processes under study, something that necessarily results in the “bigger picture” of creativity and learning and their interdependence. The idea is not to render individuals invisible but to acknowledge and illustrate that creativity emerges in the interaction and the context, not in a vacuum. We also focus on describing and providing insights concerning the frameworks, cultures, structures, and practices developed to enhance creativity and learning in different applied contexts. The book combines theoretical understandings, recent empirical findings and practical tools to be used by researchers and teaching staff, as well as practitioners, educators, and managers. The chapters included in this volume bring new evidence of the fact that creativity and learning are strongly intertwined and strongly contextual. This book has a threefold purpose: (a) to provide new information on sociocultural theories of creativity and learning in the contexts of education and working life, (b) to describe the processes of creativity and learning by presenting empirical research and examples of practice, and (c) to develop an understanding of the ways of supporting creativity and learning in different contexts. The book is thus a comprehensive, research-based volume on creativity and learning and their dynamic interconnection in various spheres of our life. The book progresses from theoretical perspectives to more practical viewpoints. In the first chapters, the writers examine the concepts of creativity and learning, as well as creative learning in general. Next, the phenomena are addressed in the contexts of children’s education, of teacher education and higher education, and finally, of working life and organizations. In each chapter, the writer/writers introduces/introduce interesting and relevant concepts and descriptions to understand creativity and learning in different contexts. The writers also

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reflect on and explore ways to support creativity and learning in different environments and with different kinds of methods or tools. In this first “introduction” chapter of the book, we, as the editors, present three main conclusions based on all the chapters of this book. In the second chapter, Ronald Beghetto frames creativity through uncertainty, and by this, to some degree, provides the ultimate warranty for creativity education as we most certainly live and work in a world filled with uncertainty, filling the gaps between our established routines and habits, on one hand, and changes, on the other hand. Beghetto discusses the central role of uncertainty in creative learning and defines the concept, leading to an understanding of uncertainty as an essential element of it. In the third chapter, Michael Hanchett Hanson and Ana Jorge-Artigau introduce readers to Howard Gruber’s (1988) work around historical materialism and individual agency, both of which have implications for the creative development of individuals in different sociohistorical contexts, such as education. The discussion partly revolves around the important topic of creative transformative agency and determinism, which are also proposed as dynamic and contextually changing. His investigation moves with systemic, interactional, and collaborative accounts, detailing the creative process as emerging over time. In the fourth chapter, Giovanni E. Corazza et al. continue this line of thought with their account of paradigmatic change from standardized education to education that can better adopt organic creativity. They discuss the problem of designing an educational system for the development of intelligence and creativity—perceived as crucial for the future. They address the importance of different means to involve the students in developing high-level cognitive skills that allow them to appropriate knowledge today and in the future. The concept of the space–time continuum can be utilized to this end. In the fifth chapter, Michael Biskjaer et al. invite us to ask which creativity we wish to educate within computing education if we want children to be creative in their use and understanding of technology. They also highlight the fact that we already (for example, in the curriculum) expect students to use creativity as a prerequisite for learning and in the manifested outcomes of learning. The authors find it important to educate our students to

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become informed and engaged participants in the increasingly digitalized twenty-first century. In line with the bifold requirements for creativity, in the sixth chapter, Tamás Szabó et al. argue for the recognition of multiple creativities as a new vision for both education and teacher education, for example, approaching everyday creativity as a manifestation of real-world learning. In their chapter, teacher professional learning is based on the diverse creativities-as-practices, which catalyzes educational change in wholeschool contexts. They also present teachers’ narratives that discursively reconstruct not only their professional identities but also their perceptions of creativity in their whole-school ecologies. Szabo et al. also investigate the Finnish National Core Curriculum and its impacts on the creativity required in schools and from teachers. In the seventh chapter, Anu Kajamaa and Sakari Hyrkkö utilize a case study of distributed creativity and expansive learning in the context of a teacher training school that conceptualizes creativity through creative acts and multiple creative acts as leading to creative leaps. The authors address the fact that creativity and novel creative products emerge as a collective interactive process. The chapter contributes to the understanding of creativity as an object-oriented and distributed process, including tensions and innovation creation in the multifaceted interactions within a group of people. In the eighth chapter, Ari Tuhkala et al. consider how a virtual enterprise simulation game (RealGame) can potentially cultivate digital creativity and collaborative learning and thus provide an example of using the digital environment to foster creativity and learning in working life and higher education. Despite their notion that students focus more on collaborative learning than on collaborative creativity, they address the importance of studying collaborative creativity in the future. In the ninth chapter, Ingunn Johanne Ness presents a description of the creative knowledge process and the characteristics attached to it in interdisciplinary groups. Additionally, she explains how these findings can be applied and transferred to another context student groups in higher education. For both employees’ and students’ creativity, Ness highlights the importance of utilizing differences constructively, for instance, by ensuring psychological safety and trust within the groups.

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In the tenth chapter, Stephen Billett et al. focus on describing the co-occurrence of work, learning and innovation. In their presented study, they provide examples of how the cultural practices that comprise occupations are remade and transformed through the co-occurrence of workers’ learning and innovation in and through work. Their findings highlight the importance of employees’ initiation, engagement and agency in innovating, as well as managers’ and supervisors’ support in offering opportunities for innovations in small and medium-size organizations (SMEs). In the last chapter, Kaija Collin et al. present the practices and structures that support creativity and learning in the context of growth companies that they have discovered through the Human Resource Management Supporting Creativity and Learning in Finnish Growth Companies (HeRMo) research project. Their findings reveal the challenges for workplace learning posed by a selfdirected organizational structure, highlight human resource development (HRD) practices supporting creativity and make visible the practices and the conflicts experienced by human resource management (HRM) concerning employee and team operations.

The Main Conclusions of This Book In all chapters, the writers illustrate and underline the importance of creativity and learning in the fast-paced and changing environments where we live. A plurality of voices is fostered, framing creativity as a prerequisite for learning, on one part, and as an evaluation aspect of the learning outcome, on the other part. Creativity is also framed as an everyday phenomenon that is connected with real-life learning, something that emerges from multiple sources and becomes manifested in various ways. Everyday creativity is connected with organic learning that is partly opposed to standardized designs and testing, with an emphasis on interpretive and transformative views of learning—aspects often associated with constructivism (e.g., Beghetto & Kaufman, 2009). Overall, the call is for sustainable and student-centered approaches where educational planning and design consider multiple perspectives—in schools as well as in working life. With this aim, the contributors address

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learners as co-authors and co-creators, partners describing their active engaging roles. The chapters’ authors provide an understanding of the importance, nature, and means of creativity and learning, as well as how these are supported in different contexts. This understanding is increasingly important for educators and practitioners in working life in a rapidly changing world where problems are complex, multifaceted, and interconnected. As the approaches drawing from the constructivist learning paradigm agree on the construction metaphor, knowledge is actively built, not passively attained. Naturally, these then produce accounts where interactions and distributed ways of producing and cocreating are emphasized, in a world and society where understanding and taking on different positions are important. From this perspective, the book makes three important—partly interconnected—contributions to understanding creativity and learning: 1. change and uncertainty as bases for creativity and learning; 2. agency and autonomy (as sources of creative interactions), leading to creativity and learning; and 3. cultures, shared goals and different methods of building, supporting, and facilitating creative learning communities.

Change and Uncertainty as Bases for Creativity and Learning In this book, we can find a wide variety of descriptions of the changes and the challenges they bring. For example, the challenges of digital transformation in educational programs (Biskjaer et al., this volume), the move toward an information and knowledge society (Corazza et al., this volume; Hyrkkö & Kajamaa, this volume), continuous growth of organizations (Collin et al., this volume) and business requirements and demands for innovations (see Billett et al., this volume; Tuhkala et al., this volume) are contexts for change that are described as the starting points for creativity and learning. Living with change often means coping with different, unfamiliar situations and adapting to something new. Both small changes in everyday life and major social or global events

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affect our operations and force or push us to look for new solutions— better ways of doing things. Changes may not always draw enthusiasm and bring inspiration; they can also be frightening or worrying. Even perceived as negative, change is still a breeding ground for learning and creativity. The coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020 has proven to be an example of such a context. The pandemic has caused tremendous concern, fear, and sadness. It has resulted in a global crisis that has adversely affected not only human health and safety but also the economy and the functioning of communities. At the same time, it has radically changed people’s behaviors, served as a breeding ground for innovation and forced us to learn new things. Vaccine development, the use of digitalization in both teaching and working life, and new (remote) community practices are examples of the creative solutions that have been implemented due to the pandemic. Situations of change, such as the coronavirus pandemic, are associated with acute experiences of uncertainty. However, as Beghetto (this volume) suggests, it is good to note that there is no creativity without uncertainty. Despite the unpleasant tone of the word, uncertainty is one of the most important starting points for creativity and often also for learning. It is natural because creative processes are unpredictable. We aim for something that we do not know yet and thus learn something new: “Creativity is needed in order to envision solutions that don’t yet exist” (Hanson & Jorge-Artigau this volume). As Hanson & Jorge-Artigau (this volume) describes, the creative process involves questions, blind alleys, frustrations and long pauses—it does not appear in a singular moment of a sudden realization but can actually include multiple Aha! experiences, some of which eventually turn out to be right and many others wrong. The same message is also conveyed by Ness (this volume), who emphasizes the need to step out of one’s own comfort zone to achieve creativity and learning. The question here concerns basically the decisions and interpretations made in interactions, where momentto-moment contingency can direct emergence of creativity in a wide range of directions (Sawyer, 2010, pp. 368–369). What is essential in creativity and learning involves the different ways of thinking or acting that arise from breaking routines (Beghetto, this volume), and this is

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the essence of uncertainty and changing environments. Inadequate and limited routines and habits make a change—framed through learning and creativity—inevitable. Thus, life not only thrives on creativity and learning but also requires both. Being aware of the systemic nature of life, as well as understanding the complexity and contingency connected to it, elaborates the basic nature of both creativity and learning. Uncertainty and change can be fertile grounds for creativity, which produces natural and organic learning and new knowledge. However, such creative learning potential essentially depends on the active engagement of the participants. It involves what decisions, interpretations, and ideas are presented and acted on in contextual and situational interactions. As Beghetto (this volume) sums it up, a new kind of thinking is needed when engaging in learning experiences and preparing for uncertainty. To maintain creativity and learning and motivate people, engagement, participation and active agency also play essential roles.

Agency and Autonomy (as Sources of Creative Interactions) Leading to Creativity and Learning In simple terms, change and uncertainty result as breaks from routines and habits, from situations where these—what used to be the case and what already exists—are not enough. When we address and offer creativity and learning as the solutions, we perceive learners and individuals as active subjects involved in the process—whether knowledge construction or creation are in question. Thus, the issue is how we can make subjects involved, interested, engaged, and act in given situations and contexts. In different chapters of this book, scholars address this “active subject” aspect with a plurality of voices. For example, Hanson and Jorge-Artigau call for students as active participants who understand, participate and take on the affordances and the challenges present in complex distributed systems. By reflecting on Gruber’s (1988) ideas on agency, a proposal highlighting the importance of a person’s sense of purpose as a source of this agentic enablement is made (see also Archer, 2012). Tuhkala et al. (this volume) take a different approach

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to subject activity, describing a process where engagement is facilitated by the immersive nature of gamified simulation (RealGame). Using the RealGame, they state that providing an “environment where failures are safe and acceptable” and where team “decisions are [made] continuously and in synchronous collaboration” will lead to authentic experiences, open-minded thinking, and the potential emergence of new insights. According to the sociocultural paradigm, creativity and learning do not happen in a vacuum. Simply stated, the perspectives and philosophical assumptions behind different views appear significant—and if we still adhere to constructivism, knowledge is contingent on human practices, and meaning is constructed in interactions between the subjects and their surroundings (e.g., Crotty, 1998, pp. 42–48)—for the understanding and assumption generated. Generally, throughout the different chapters, explicit—and at times implicit—accounts of perspectives, stances and viewpoints are used to describe human agency in the midst of social interaction, namely, how knowledge is built and meanings are given. As part of this discussion, it is important to acknowledge the complexity of learning and working ecosystems. Formal and traditional learning arrangements are often directed by official documents, such as curricula. Biskjaer et al. (this volume) focus on one subject curriculum in Denmark and find that creativity is presented there through a doublebind conceptualization, framed as both a prerequisite and an outcome of learning. One solution is their call for collaboration and contributions from creativity scholars (literature) to the teaching—a worthy idea that they frame as follows: “come together to ask the inconvenient, but inevitable question of which creativity we wish to educate … if children should learn to be (more) creative.” This might also connect with the multiple creativity approach (Szabo et al., this volume), focusing on everyday creativity as a manifestation of real-world learning, and how that could be advocated in pre- and in-service teacher training. Through contemplation on the nature of knowledge and the ownership and authorship of new knowledge, new learning, and new ways of teaching, Szabo et al. argue for the creative ecologies model . By diversifying and pluralizing the creativities in school, Szabo et al. show through situational and contextual examples how everyday creativity is important for education and learning, as well as how transformational changes arise

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from this real-world learning that entails material and immaterial enactments in the intersectional entanglements of various creative ecological components. There is a need for a more distributed, rhizomatic approach (in pre- and in-service teacher education and beyond). Beghetto (this volume) describes (the creative process in terms of ) engaging with creative opportunities and transforming these into creative actions and achievements, depending on individual and group values. The question is whether “they are willing to take the creative risk to engage with uncertainty.” The idea not only gives in to the autonomous decision making instilled in human beings but also acknowledges the potentially deterministic nature of situations and contexts. Rightly, Hanson et al. (this volume) ask, “Are we equipping students to understand the deterministic forces of their worlds and exercise agency as they participate in, encounter, and/or resist those systems?” Thus, it is proposed (e.g., Beghetto, this volume) that it would be important to focus on shared and expressed established values (e.g., the value given to creativity) and how these influence students’ confidence and willingness to take risks. It is proposed that students (and why this should not include employees) need to be given the opportunities to develop a positive creative identity if we want to support the recognition and transformation of creative opportunities into creative acts and achievements. In the bigger picture, this discussion pans back to the discussion addressing the relations of individuals and structures, so the question is what we really want to support and facilitate in our schools and in further working life—traditional knowledge transition or collaborative co-construction of knowledge. The issue becomes visible in accounts about the autonomy and decision making of individuals in given contexts. Does the system allow and support the needed creativity and organic learning of various stakeholders (including teachers, students, and employees)? As approaches can be perceived as drawing from the constructivist paradigm—which as such does not necessarily make statements about the nature of being, just about the nature of knowing—it is necessary to acknowledge and respect the active roles of different subjects. Whether the framing is collaborative learning or creative learning, it all pans out to social interactions in given situations and contexts, expanded with cultural artifacts (both

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abstract and tangible) and interpretations drawn from those. How do we respond to the complex challenges? Do we allow enactment in learning and interaction situations? Do contextual and situational outlines repeat traditional educational arrangements and roles, or is there room for change and uncertainty? Education can have an impact on and facilitate active agency (engagement, active participation, etc.) and autonomy in and with various arrangements. The following chapters include ideas and insights on how education design, planning, and arrangements can be made to support creativity and real-life organic learning, as advocated here. They can influence creativity, attitudes, and agency. Therefore, through creative experiences, trust and self-belief build the expertise that is called for in a changing and uncertain future. The question now is how to learn and teach pupils, students, teachers, or personnel of organizations and entire education communities to be creative or act creatively.

Cultures, Shared Goals, and Different Methods of Building, Supporting, and Facilitating Creative Learning Communities From the perspective of constructivism, in defining, promoting, and realizing creativity and learning, the priority is to take into account the views of different actors (students, pupils, teachers, managers, and employees) and to build an understanding based on these together. Thus, supporting creativity and learning starts from the moment when the discourses of creativity are created. As Biskjaer et al. (this volume) note, “Students need didactic support in order to thoroughly engage with creativity in (at last some of ) its conceptual complexity as a fundamental part of our lives and learning as human beings.” Similarly, Hanson and Jorge-Artigau (this volume) points out that students should be helped to participate in complex, distributed systems of change, as they are not simply just receivers of such lessons but active actors who themselves should understand the values, framework, and challenges of long-term development from their own points of view. The involvement of individuals thus enables a commitment to creativity, as well as a means of interaction

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through a common dialogue, regardless of whether it involves a young pupil, an older student or an adult worker. It is therefore essential to investigate what factors enable individuals to participate and engage in creativity and learning. In several chapters of this book, a culture that supports collaborations and the engagement of individuals becomes an important driver of creativity and learning (see, e.g., Hyrkkö & Kajamaa, this volume). As Ness (this volume) states, confidence and psychological safety are important when we go to an uncertain area and step outside our comfort zone. It must be possible to ask silly questions and make mistakes, as they are part of the learning process. Billett et al. (this volume) point out that in the workplace, it is essential to create an environment where employees can truly work innovatively and produce practices and products that meet changing customer requirements. The kind of environment that innovative activities require in any workplace is often context-specific, as Collin et al. (this volume) describe. In terms of culture, Collin et al. show the importance of first developing the equality-promoting and clear organizational structures and practices, and then taking into account individual (i.e., employee-oriented) needs. Leaders and supervisors (see Billett et al., this volume; Collin et al., this volume) seem to play a key role in creating an environment conducive to creativity and learning in the workplace, in the same way as teachers do in educational organizations (e.g., Szábo et al., this volume). Of course, the creation of atmosphere and culture is also influenced by individuals, whether colleagues or fellow students. In collective processes of creativity and learning, it is important to form and become aware of a shared goal (Hyrkkö & Kajamaa, this volume). This focus is linked to the previously described creation of a common understanding and from a community or societal perspective, to the larger question of which creativity we wish to educate individuals (Gl˘aveanu, 2015). A shared, commonly defined and accepted goal engages actors to work toward it and create a framework for creative action. This book’s contributors also highlight a variety of tools, methods, and concrete means (affordances) that can support creativity and learning in different contexts. Examples are different pedagogies in

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the context of education (Corazza et al., this volume), courses and interventions (Hyrkkö & Kajamaa, this volume; Szábo et al., this volume), dialogical methods (Ness et al., this volume), and various checkpoint and developmental discussions in the workplace (Collin et al., this volume). In the era of remote working and schooling, digital tools have become increasingly important for supporting creativity and learning. They are not only forms of support for individual learning and independent action but at best, enablers of collaborative learning (see Tuhkala et al., this volume). Digital tools can support learning and creativity by providing access to a variety of discussion forums, enabling feedback from others, or fostering group interaction, regardless of time and place. For example, the RealGame presented by Tuhkala et al. (this volume) appears to foster “collaborative learning and creativity by providing an environment for practising both domain-specific and general skills.” This book gathers a great deal of understanding and knowledge about creativity and learning and how to support and enable them in different contexts. Nevertheless, there are still many research needs and gaps related to the two phenomena. Changing contexts, tools, and trends are constantly creating new situations and challenges that require creativity and learning. Amid rapid change and uncertainty, we are on the ground of creativity and learning; at the same time, our well-being can be put to the test. It is important to remember that well-being and enthusiasm are also essential prerequisites for creativity and learning. For this reason, in the future, we must also find ways to strike a balance between uncertainty and well-being and strengthen the opportunities for enthusiasm that such a balance is meant to offer.

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2 Uncertainty: A Necessary Condition for Creative Learning Ronald A. Beghetto

Introduction There is no creativity without uncertainty. In many cases we can move through our day-to-day lives following established routines and habits. When we encounter disruptions in these habits and routines, however, we are compelled to think and act differently. In this way, creativity commences with uncertainty. Uncertainty also plays a role in the midst of our creative experiences, because such experiences are characterized by open-endedness and a non-linear trajectory (Gl˘aveanu & Beghetto, in press). Indeed, when engaged in creative activities we may not know exactly how to proceed, whether our thoughts and actions will result in meaningful outcomes, or how others might experience and perceive our efforts. Uncertainty also plays a role after having engaged in creative R. A. Beghetto (B) Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_2

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experiences. Although we may creatively resolve the uncertainty we face, such resolutions are, at best, indefinite as it is always possible for new uncertainties to arise and thereby render seemingly finalized creative thoughts and acts inconclusive (Anderson, 1987; Corazza, 2016). Creative thought and action therefore always entail some element of uncertainty, this includes experiences with creative learning and instructional and assessment efforts aimed at supporting creative learning. Creative learning refers to a combination of intra and interpsychological processes that result in new and meaningful understandings for oneself and others (Beghetto, 2016). The aim of this chapter is to discuss how uncertainty motivates—literally moves us—in the direction of creative learning and serves as a necessary condition for creative learning, instruction, and assessment activities. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the nature of creative learning and the role uncertainty plays in creative endeavors. Understanding the relationship between creative learning and uncertainty is particularly important given that uncertainty plays a central role in creative learning but is often viewed as an experience that should be avoided and even designed out of learning experiences. Next, I describe the implications for designing creative learning experiences that anticipate and intentionally incorporate uncertainty into instructional and assessment practices supportive of creative learning. The chapter closes with brief implications for theory, research, and practice, including how the ideas presented in this chapter provide new directions for how researchers can design studies aimed at developing our understanding of how uncertainty might be leveraged in the context of creative learning experiences.

The Role of Uncertainty in Creative Learning Prior to understanding the role that uncertainty plays in creative learning it is first important to understand the nature of creative learning. Creative learning represents an emergent concept, blending the constructs of creativity and learning. Standard definitions of creativity (e.g., Plucker et al., 2004; Runco & Jaeger, 2012; but see Gl˘aveanu & Beghetto, 2020), tend to define creativity with two contextually dependent criteria:

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originality and usefulness. With respect to learning, the concept has been defined as “ a multidimensional process that results in a relatively enduring change in a person or persons…” (Alexander et al., 2009, p. 186). Although there is a long tradition in the field of creativity studies that has recognized the interrelated aspects of creativity and learning (see Beghetto, 2016 for a discussion), not all researchers have approached the concepts of creativity and learning in the same way. Indeed, when considering creativity and learning as two separate constructs, there are at least three different ways this relationship can be conceptualized: no relationship, a positive relationship, or negative relationship. Although prior empirical work examining the relationship between indicators of creativity and learning has provided some evidence for all three of these conceptualizations, a recent meta-analysis has demonstrated a positive (albeit modest) relationship (r = 0.22, 95% CI [0.19, 0.24]) between indicators of creativity and academic achievement (Gajda et al., 2017a). The concept of creative learning represents the emergent outcome of combining creativity and learning. It is not simply an additive conception of creativity or learning, but rather represent a third, unique concept. This is not to say that it does not retain some of the defining features of creativity and learning, indeed it does. As mentioned, creative learning is defined as the development of new and meaningful understandings and actions for oneself and others that result from the combination of intrapsychological (subjective) and interpsychological (socio-contextual) processes (Beghetto, 2016, 2020a). The new and meaningful features of the process represent the creative components of creative learning and the resulting understandings and actions represent the learning component of the concept. Importantly, however, creative learning goes beyond the separate concepts of creativity and learning by describing the dynamic and indefinite combination of intrapsychological (subjective) and interpsychological (socio-contextual) processes (Beghetto, 2016, 2020a).

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Intra and Interpsychological Processes of Creative Learning Given the aim of this chapter is to focus on the role that uncertainty plays in creative learning, the more detailed intra and interpsychological processes of creative learning will serve more of a backdrop to the discussion of how uncertainty animates the process (readers interested in a more detailed treatment of these processes are directed to Beghetto, 2016; Beghetto & Schreiber, 2017; Beghetto & Schuh, 2020). Figure 2.1 provides an illustration of how these previously theorized processes can play out within and across individuals and socio-cultural and historical contexts (see also Gajda et al., 2017b for an empirical exploration of the interpsychological processes). As depicted in Fig. 2.1, creative learning commences with participants encountering uncertainty by way of novel learning stimuli (denoted by ). In formal educational settings, such encounters typically involve encounters with novel academic subject matter or unique learning tasks.

Fig. 2.1 Uncertainty in creative learning

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According to the creative learning perspective (Beghetto, 2016, 2020a), when students engage with uncertainty in the form of an optimally novel learning stimuli they are moved into a potential state of creative learning. The idea of an optimally novel stimulus highlights that not all encounters with uncertainty will provoke a state of creative learning. Indeed, if the students judge the uncertainty they encounter as being too novel or overwhelming they may feel incapable of engaging with it (e.g., “I don’t understand this! This is too confusing. I have no idea where to start?!?!” ). At the opposite end of the continuum, if students find a learning stimulus too mundane or not novel enough then they may simply view it as something they already know and quickly recognize it or even dismiss it. (e.g., “I already know this. I learned this last year. I can’t believe I’m being taught this again. This is boring” ). Creative learning is thereby animated in the liminal space between too much uncertainty and not enough uncertainty. This space represents “actionable uncertainty” (Beghetto, 2020b) and is recognized as something new, which requires engagement to resolve and, importantly, which is judged as actionable. More specifically, the student recognizes that although they may not yet know how to make sense of the subject matter or task, they’re willing and confident in their ability to engage with the stimulus in an effort to make sense of it (e.g., “This is new, I’ve never thought of this before. I’m not exactly sure how to do this, but I will try to figure it out” ). The judgments people make about the actionable nature of learning stimuli are informed by one’s own prior learning trajectory and socialcontextual, linguistic, and cultural cues in one’s environment (Beghetto & Schuh, 2020; Beghetto & Yoon, in press). In this way, there is an agentic aspect to creative learning. Even though all participants in a learning environment have the potential to engage in creative learning, they may for a variety of intra and interpsychological reasons judge those stimuli as unactionable.

Agentic and Socio-Cultural Perspective With respect to intrapsychological reasons, recent theory, and research (Beghetto et al., 2020; Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019) has indicated that

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there are at least three agentic judgments that seem to play an important role in moving from creative potential to creative action. Specifically, when applied to the case of creative learning, this agentic perspective asserts that when students encounter novel learning stimuli they make judgments about their confidence to engage with those stimuli, determine whether they see personal value in doing so, and ultimately whether they are willing to take the creative risks necessary to engage with uncertainty. The risk of engaging with uncertainty involves the potential hazards of appearing less competent than others, publicly making mistakes, and failure. The risks of engaging with uncertainty also involve the potential benefits of developing new and personally meaningful understandings and skills by combining the novel stimuli with their own prior knowledge. Moreover, as will be discussed, an additional potential benefit of engaging in the full process of creative learning is that doing so can contribute to the learning and lives of others. Given that the potential benefits tend to outweigh the potential hazards, including the possibility of benefiting others, the risks of engaging with uncertainty in the context of creative learning can be thought of as adaptive or what has elsewhere been called a beautiful risk (Beghetto, 2019). When viewed from an intrapsychological perspective, the first phase of creative learning involves the personal sense-making process or “creativity-in-learning” (Beghetto, 2016). This aspect of creative learning ). illustrated in the shaded ovels of Fig. 2.1 (and denoted by Participants who engages with uncertainty (denoted by ) and are able to develop a new and personally meaningful understanding (denoted by ) can be said to have engaged in the intrapsychological process of creative learning. This intrapsychological process is not entirely subjective or solitary, indeed the interpsychological process of engaging with uncertainty in a given socio-cultural and historical context is intertangled with a given individual’s sense-making process. Teachers and peers can, for instance, provide feedback, cues, differing perspectives and other supports or challenges (denoted by the bi-directional dotted lines in Fig. 2.1). Moreover, one’s prior learning trajectory (Beghetto & Schuh, 2020), inner-dialogues with past, present, and imagined future interlocutors (Beghetto, 2016) can influence in the moment sense-making. In this way, a given participant’s creative sense-making process can be said

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to influence and be dynamically influenced by the uncertainty they are encountering (denoted by the bi-directional relationship in Fig. 2.1) and influence and be influenced by the broader socio-cultural and historical context (denoted by the various connections to other participants and their immediate and distal context in Fig. 2.1). The intrapsychological processes involved in creative learning are therefore not sealed off or separated from the immediate situational and broader socio-cultural and historical features of their learning environment. Rather, the intrapsychological processes of creative learning occur in conjunction with the interpsychological features of creative learning. This is perhaps most clearly seen in situations wherein participants in the learning environment are encouraged to share their emerging understandings and engage with new and emerging insights, perspectives, understandings, and actions of others. Figure 2.1 illustrates how the expression of an insight can provoke direct encounters with uncertainty ). for others in their immediate environment (as denoted by the

Secondary Phase of Creative Learning An example of a student’s creative insight triggering creative learning for others would be a student sharing a unique perspective during a class discussion that, in turn, provokes uncertainty for other students and even the teacher. Indeed, when a student shares an unexpected, new, or different perspective and their peers and teachers are willing to engage with that uncertainty it is possible that it can creatively contribute to others. This secondary phase of creative learning has been called the “learning-in-creativity” component of creative learning (Beghetto, 2016), which refers to the process by which students’ novel conceptions creatively contribute to the learning and understanding of others. Another way of describing this process is the movement from subjective mini-c creative insights (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007) to little-c creative contributions recognized by others (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). In the context of creative learning, an example of a mini-c insight would be a home chef developing a new technique for poaching an egg using a coffee cup and hot water from an espresso machine (Beghetto et al., 2016).

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When this home chef shares this technique with another home cook, it can creatively contribute to the second home cook’s understanding and repertoire of egg poaching techniques. This dynamic transformation between primary creative experiences (e.g., mini-c insights) and secondary creative contributions to others (e.g., little-c recognition and experiences of others) highlights the potential for intrapsychological creative learning experiences to continue on and contribute to the interpsychological creative learning of others in and beyond classroom settings (Beghetto, 2007; Runco & Beghetto, 2018). Specifically, in cases whereby artifacts of creative learning (e.g., student work samples, video-taped lessons, lesson transcripts, and detailed narratives or retellings of creative events in and beyond the classroom) have been curated and shared beyond the immediate context, it becomes possible for the creative learning process to become reanimated and continue to make contributions across time, contexts and audiences (Beghetto, 2019). In this way, creative learning holds an undetermined or even unlimited potential for meaning making, which is not temporally or spatially bounded by particular individuals in particular contexts (Beghetto, 2020a; Beghetto & Schuh, 2020; Eco, 1986). This is not to say that the creative meaning making that occurs at the intrapsychological or interpsychological level always results in a creative contribution. Indeed, what is experienced as a new and personally meaningful insight for one person may be viewed as routine or even as a misunderstanding by others (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007). This is illustrated in Fig. 2.1 with a shared insight or provoked uncertainty stopping within another , respectively). participant in the environment (denoted by and A student may, for instance, share a new and personally meaningful (mini-c) insight about how to solve a particular type of math problem and the teacher (and peers) recognize that what the student shared as a standard approach to solving such problems. Along similar lines, students may come-up with their own way of trying to explain a scientific phenomenon that they view as new and viable, but after discussion with the teacher and peers realize that their understanding is based on a common scientific misunderstanding. That said, it is possible through peer and teacher feedback that even a seemingly misunderstood conception can be refined into a creative insight (see Ball, 1993 for a discussion

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and extended example). The potential for these various additional pathways is illustrated in Fig. 2.1 with the bi-directional feedback loops moving between participants and ultimately resulting in the creative contribution of a new insight for participants. Taken together the various possibilities and pathways discussed above and illustrated in Fig. 2.1 demonstrate the centrality of uncertainty in the intrapsychological and interpsychological processes involved in creative learning. In this way, uncertainty serves both as a catalyst and animating condition for creative learning in and beyond a particular learning event. The next step in understanding the centrality that uncertainty plays in creative learning involves considering the role it plays in designing creativity supportive instructional and assessment practices. This is the focus of the section that follows.

Uncertainty in Educational Practices Supportive of Creative Learning As has been discussed, not all experiences with uncertainty will result in creative learning, however, instructional and assessment practices supportive of creative learning always involve some level of uncertainty. In what follows, I will unpack this assertion and demonstrate how two key experiences with uncertainty can be leveraged to support creative learning. Prior to doing so, it is important to outline two key assumptions and constraints. First, although creative learning represents a complex, simultaneity of relationships and experiences among participants in and beyond an immediate learning environment, the focus of this section is on the interrelationship between teacher (inter/re)actions and student (inter/re)actions. Typical descriptions of instructional and assessment practices often describe the design and delivery of instructional and assessment activities from the vantage point of the teacher (e.g., teacher planning, teacher decision making) rather than explicitly recognize how the design and enactment of activities can benefit from actual or anticipated student–teacher (inter/re)actions. The mutually dependent (inter/re)action among teachers and students is particularly pronounced

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in the context of creative learning, because of the always and everpresent potential of creative learning to be stimulated in and beyond what has been planned and expected. This assumption of mutual dependence constrains the extent to which the teachers’ role in supporting creative learning can be discussed in isolation from the (inter/re)actions of students in the learning environment. This leads to the second assumption and constraint. Even when teachers anticipate and attempt to account student–student (inter/re)actions, there is always a gap between planned and lived curricular activities (Aoki, 2004). This is because once instructional and assessment planned are animated through action, the socio-material features of the environment push-back against such plans causing ruptures that reveal a new horizon of possibilities (Beghetto, 2016). These ruptures can be interpreted in multiple ways ranging from signifiers of potentially problematic curricular disruptions (e.g., taking the students and teachers into the territory of confusion, misunderstanding, even chaos) to productive creative opportunities (e.g., leading to new and meaningful perspectives, insights, understandings, actions). The challenge with such ruptures is that it is often difficult for teachers and students to know how they will unfold and what trajectory they will take. Much therefore depends on how teachers and students orient themselves to these ruptures, which includes establishing a shared willingness to anticipate and, at least briefly, engage with ruptures by making in the moment, improvisational moves to explore the creative potential of such openings while at the same time monitoring whether such explorations are drifting too far away from meaningful learning (see Beghetto & Kaufman, 2011). With these two assumptions and constraints in mind, we can now turn our discussion to how educators and students can leverage uncertainty in educational activities in an effort to support creative learning. More specifically, Table 2.1 (based on 2020b; Beghetto, 2019) provides an overview of how different types of uncertainty can be leveraged in instructional and assessment practices in an effort to support creative learning.

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Table 2.1 Leveraging uncertainty in instructional activities and assessment tasks Experience with uncertainty Educational activity

Encountered

Planned

Instruction supportive of creative learning

Teachers and students anticipating, noticing, and productively responding unexpected ruptures in planned instructional activities

Assessment supportive of creative learning

Teachers and students anticipating, noticing, and exploring the creative potential of unexpected responses to planned assessments

Teachers and students establishing to-be-determined opportunities and openings in instructional activities and preparing themselves to engage with those openings Teachers and students considering options for allowing different ways to meet assessment criteria and preparing themselves to do so on assessment tasks

As illustrated in Table 2.1, there are at least two types of uncertainty that can be leveraged in support of creative learning. The first is encountered uncertainty and the second is planned uncertainty. Each will be discussed in the sections that follow.

Encountered Uncertainty Encountered uncertainty represents surprising or unexpected ruptures in planned instructional, assessment, and learning activities. Although these ruptures or openings can manifest from a variety of internal and external sources (See Beghetto, 2016, 2020a for a discussion), from the perspective of teachers and students these ruptures tend to occur when a student responds unexpectedly to a planned instructional activity (i.e., a student shares a surprising idea or interpretation during a class discussion) or assessment task (i.e., a student provides an unusual or unexpected response on an assessment). Perhaps the most common example of this unexpected response leading to a potentially creative rupture occurs in the context of a class

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discussion (see Ball, 1993; Beghetto, 2013; Gadja et al., 2017a, 2017b; Kennedy, 2005). In this case, the process of creative learning has already moved into the interpsychological sphere because the student is sharing a mini-c insight. The creative learning potential of this type of rupture remains latent and becomes animated only through active engagement on the part of teachers and peers. The prototypical patterns of classroom talk—with teachers asking known-answer questions and students attempting to respond those questions in expected ways (Beghetto, 2013; Mehan, 1979)—often conspire against actively engaging with the unexpected. This is because, taking time to explore these openings—particularly in the moment that they occur—tends be viewed as potentially risking by taking the class “off-script,” which can result in wasting scarce instructional time or even introducing unnecessary confusion (Beghetto, 2013; Kennedy, 2005). The flipside of this risk, however, is rarely given equal treatment. Indeed, failing to explore (even briefly) the creative possibilities of these ruptures also runs the risk of denying potentially important, generative, and ultimately creative learning insights for students and teachers (Beghetto, 2019). Given that creative learning is not necessarily bound by the immediate situational and temporal context, it is possible for a rupture to be engaged with at a later point either directly by following up with the student or indirectly through reflection. Consequently, the creative learning potential of encounters with uncertainty remain latent both in the immediate “micro-moment” occurrence (Beghetto, 2013) and beyond the instance of the rupture. Engaging with the uncertainty of these ruptures in planned instructional and assessment activities is the only way to determine whether this potential will result in creative learning in and beyond the classroom context. This is why it is important for educators and students to at least briefly explore these creative openings (either in the moment of their occurrence or at a later point in time when it is feasible to do so).

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Planned Uncertainty Another type of uncertainty that can potentially result in creative learning is what has been called planned uncertainty (Beghetto, 2019) or uncertainty by design. Unlike the encountered uncertainty, planned uncertainty pertains to intentionally designing instructional and assessment activities such that they provide opportunities for students and teachers to engage with uncertainty in an otherwise structured and supportive learning environment. This is the first aspect of planned uncertainty and pertains to the teacher’s decision making and design of lessons and assessments. Although students typically are precluded from this design work, under a creative learning framework they can be included in at least some aspect of this work. Doing so, of course, alters the prototypical roles and responsibilities of teachers and students and is not always necessary for creative learning, but allows for an additional level of structured uncertainty that may be beneficial to establish a creativity conducive environment. In such arranges, teachers can incorporate student voice into their decision making and design process while still maintaining their professional teaching responsibilities and obligations by establishing and clarifying learning expectations, goals, and criteria for success. A key question that needs to be addressed in an effort to move in this direction is: How might teachers accomplish this both/and approach—fulfilling their professional obligations, while still seeking and incorporating student voice in their instructional planning? One way that this can be accomplished is through what I call “wire-frame lesson designing.” This approach to lesson design refers to teachers clearly outlining the goals and criteria (i.e., the non-negotiables) a particular learning or assessment activity, but the way in which those goals and criteria are met and even how those goals are documented can be determined by students (see Beghetto, 2019, 2020c). A good place to start is with a previously planned learning activity or assessment task wherein all the key elements have been predetermined (i.e., the task to be addressed, the procedures for engaging with the task, the products or outcomes to be produced, and the criteria for success) and transforming one or more into to-be-determined elements. Consider a learning activity (or

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assessment task) that, for instance, involves having students’ practice (or demonstrate competence in) developing and presenting a persuasive argument. Instead of predetermining all of the elements of this task (i.e., the topic, the process, the product, and the criteria for success), teachers can instead invite students to meet the criteria in their own way by coming-up with their own topic, their own process for providing a persuasive argument and their own product to demonstrating their understanding and competence. In addition to a curricular design that better accommodates opportunities for creative learning, the second aspect of planned uncertainty pertains to an action orientation on the part of students and teachers. This aspect of planned uncertainty pertains to students and teachers anticipating and preparing themselves to engage with planned and unplanned curricular uncertainties in an effort to produce potentially novel and meaningful learning for themselves and others. Preparing oneself (and others) for uncertainty entails a willingness to engage with uncertainty, rather than avoid it or try to force-fit previous ways of thinking and acting. Such an orientation requires teachers to actively monitor how students are experiencing planned uncertainties to ensure that the planned activities are neither too overwhelming and frustrating nor too familiar or not sufficiently challenging (Beghetto, 2019). Students also play a role in this process by agreeing to seek out additional assistance when they need it and challenge themselves to think and act in new ways, persistent in the face of challenges, and even provide necessary supports to others. This combination of opportunities for creative learning and shared commitments to productively engaging with uncertainty can go a long way in transforming uncertainty into creative learning experiences for teachers and students in and beyond the classroom environment.

Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice Having outlined the core assertions and assumptions surrounding the claim that uncertainty serves as a necessary catalyst and condition for

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creative learning, this final section will briefly outline some implications for theory, research, and practice. Theoretically speaking, the ideas presented in this chapter help to further build on the creative learning framework that I and others have been developing (e.g., Beghetto, 2016, 2020a; Beghetto & Schuh, 2020; Beghetto & Yoon, in press). Moreover, these ideas contribute to growing interest in how to conceptualize the relationship between creativity and learning (e.g., current volume, Sefton-Green et al., 2011). Indeed, the focus of this chapter has been on clarifying the central role that uncertainty plays in motivating and sustaining creative learning. This perspective aligns with several emerging views in the field, including the dynamic and inconclusive features of creativity (Corazza, 2016) as well as conceptualizations of the creative experience (Gl˘aveanu & Beghetto, 2020), which focuses on the generative, open-ended, multiperspectival, non-linear, and future-orientated nature of creative encounters. Finally, the ideas presented herein also provide additional considerations for theorizing that views creativity as agentic action (Beghetto et al., in press; Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019). Specifically, an agentic view of creativity recognizes that people are more likely to engage with creative opportunities and transform those into creative actions and achievements if they value creativity, have confidence in their creative abilities, and are willing to take creative risks. As has been discussed in this chapter, experiences with uncertainty serve as a primary motivator and condition for creative action. I therefore invite creativity researchers working in these and related areas to take up the concept of uncertainty in their theorizing of creative learning and in their work on creative thought and action more generally. Practically speaking, this chapter points to considerations for how educators and curricular designers might rethink the role and importance of engaging with and planning for uncertainty in learning experiences. By viewing uncertainty as a necessary condition for creative learning (rather than something that should be avoided or designed out of learning experiences), practitioners will be in a better position to leverage uncertainty as a key opportunity to develop more generative learning experiences. Such encounters can also be used to develop the kinds of

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creative self-beliefs (Karwowski et al., 2019) that serve as key facets of one’s developing creative identity. Indeed, unless students have opportunities to develop a positive creative identity, which includes a healthy sense of creative confidence, a recognition of their own creative potentials, and the knowledge and willingness necessary to take creative action then it seems unlikely that they will convert their creative potential into creative expression, action, and achievements. Curricular experiences that provide students with opportunities to creatively engage with uncertainty and opportunities to reflect on their own self-assessments of their creative abilities represent an important area of creative curricular development. Students, for instance, can be encouraged to self-assess their confidence and willingness to engage creatively with uncertainty and then actively reflect on both what was learned about such experiences and how those experiences influence their creative identity development. Finally, empirically speaking, the ideas presented in this chapter provide new directions for how researchers can design studies aimed at testing out, refining, and developing our understanding of how uncertainty might be leveraged in the context of creative learning experiences. There are at least two interrelated strands of research that can be developed based on the ideas presented in this chapter. The first strand pertains to observational and case-studies aimed at exploring how teachers and students respond to encounters with uncertainty in the midst of instructional and assessment practices. This strand complements and builds on existing efforts that have offered promising methodologies for documenting and analyzing these encounters in the context of classroom discussions (see for instance, Ball, 1993; Beghetto, 2017; Gadja et al., 2017a, 2017b; Tannggaard & Beghetto, 2015). Additional efforts along these lines are needed to explore encounters with uncertainty in other educational activities, such as responses on classroom assessments and other types of individual and small group learning activities. Diary-based and other everyday methods, combined with the analysis of artifacts, and interview methodologies using artifacts as stimuli for discussion may provide insights into this untapped area of inquiry. The second strand of research would focus on how experiences with planned uncertainty might support creative learning for students and

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teachers. Although I have prototyped some of these processes in my own teaching at the university level and my professional development work with educators, there is a need for the development of more formal programs of research that can systematically examine and document the process and experiences of designing for uncertainty in instructional and assessment activities. Indeed, such work can build on the long tradition in education of teacher planning and decision making as well as the various documented examples of educators who have opened their curriculum in ways described in this chapter (see, Ball, 1993; Beghetto, 2018). Doing so will provide insights into experiences, challenges, benefits and potential drawbacks of adopting such an approach in the everyday curricula of K12 schools. The use of detailed case-studies, observations, interviews, and analysis of artifacts may serve as a good starting point to further develop our understanding of how and under what conditions designing for uncertainty supports students’ and teachers’ creative learning in and beyond the classroom. My hope is that researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the role that uncertainty plays in creative learning will find the ideas and suggestions offered in this chapter as a useful starting point in for testing and developing them in their own theorizing, research and practice.

References Alexander, P. A., Schallert, D. L., & Reynolds, R. E. (2009). What is learning anyway? A topographical perspective considered. Educational Psychologist, 44, 176–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903029006. Anderson, D. R. (1987). Creativity and the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Kluwer. Aoki, T. T. (2004). Spinning inspirited images. In W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 413– 225). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ball, D. L. (1993). With an eye on the mathematical horizon: Dilemmas of teaching elementary school mathematics. The Elementary School Journal, 93, 373–397.

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Beghetto, R. A. (2007). Ideational code-switching: Walking the talk about supporting student creativity in the classroom. Roeper Review, 29, 265–270. Beghetto, R. A. (2013). Killing ideas softly? The promise and perils of creativity in the classroom. Information Age Publishing. Beghetto, R. A. (2016). Creative learning: A fresh look. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, 15, 6–23. Beghetto, R. A. (2017). Creative openings in the social interactions of teaching. Creativity: Theories-Research-Applications, 3, 261–273. Beghetto, R. A. (2018). What if? Building students’ problem solving skills through complex challenges. ASCD Beghetto, R. A. (2019). Beautiful risks: Having the courage to teach and learn with creativity. Rowman & Littlefield. Beghetto, R. A. (2020). Assessment that supports classroom creativity. In E. R. McClure & G. Jaeger (Eds.), Assessing creativity: A Pallete of possibilities. LEGO Foundation. Beghetto R. A. (2020a) Creative learning and the possible. In V. Gl˘aveanu (Eds.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of the possible. Palgrave Macmillan. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_57-1. Beghetto, R. A. (2020b). Uncertainty: A gateway to the possible. In V. Gl˘aveanu (Eds.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of the possible. Palgrave Macmillan. Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2007). Toward a broader conception of creativity: A case for mini-c creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 1, 73–79. Beghetto, R. A., & Kaufman, J. C. (2011). Teaching for creativity with disciplined improvisation. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The 21st century teacher: Creativity and improvisation in the classroom. Cambridge University Press. Beghetto, R. A., Kaufman, J. C., & Hatcher, R. (2016). Applying creativity research to cooking. Journal of Creative Behavior, 50, 171–177. Beghetto, R. A. & Schuh, K. L. (2020). Exploring the link between imagination and creativity: A creative learning approach (pp. 249–267). In D. Preiss, D. Cosmelli, & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), Mind wandering and creativity. Elsevier. Beghetto, R. A. & Yoon, S. A. (in press). Change through creative learning: Toward realizing the creative potential of translanguaging. In C. A. Mullen (Ed.), Handbook of social justice interventions in education. Springer.

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Beghetto, R. A., Karwowski, M., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2020). Intellectual risk taking: A moderating link between creative confidence and creative behavior? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000323. Beghetto R. A., & Schreiber J. B. (2017). Creativity in doubt: Toward understanding what drives creativity in learning. In R. Leikin, & B. Sriraman (Eds.), Creativity and giftedness: Advances in mathematics education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38840-3_10. Corazza, G. (2016). Potential originality and effectiveness: The dynamic definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 28, 258–267. Eco, U. (1986). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Indiana. Gajda, A., Beghetto, R. A., & Karwowski, M. (2017a). Exploring creative learning in the classroom: A multi-method approach. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 24 (250), 267. Gajda, A., Karwowski, M., & Beghetto, R. A. (2017b). Creativity and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109, 269–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000133. Gl˘aveanu, V., & Beghetto, R. A. (2020). Creative experience: A non-standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal . https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10400419.2020.1827606. Karwowski, M., & Beghetto, R. A. (2019). Creative behavior as agentic action. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(4), 402–415. https://doi. org/10.1037/aca0000190. Karwowski, M., Lebuda, I., & Beghetto, R. (2019). Creative self-beliefs. In J. Kaufman & R. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 396–418). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316979839.021. Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The Four C Model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13, 1–12. Kennedy, M. (2005). Inside teaching: How classroom life undermines reform. Harvard University Press. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Harvard University Press. Plucker, J. A., Beghetto, R. A., & Dow, G. T. (2004). Why isn’t creativity more important to educational psychologists? Potentials, pitfalls, and future directions in creativity research. Educational Psychologist, 39, 83–96. https:// doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep3902_1. Runco, M. A., & Beghetto, R. A. (2018). Primary and Secondary Creativity. Behavioral Sciences, 27 , 7–10.

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Runco, M. A., & Jaeger, G. J. (2012). The standard definition of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 24 (1), 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/104 00419.2012.650092. Sefton-Green, J., Thomson, P., Jones, K., & Bresler, L. (Eds.). (2011). The Routledge international handbook of creative learning. Routledge. Tanggaard, L., & Beghetto, R. A. (2015). Ideational pathways: Toward a new approach for studying the life of ideas. Creativity: Theories-ResearchApplications, 2, 129–144.

3 Time to Think: Lessons about Purpose and Agency from Case Studies Michael Hanchett Hanson and Ana Jorge-Artigau

Introduction Does our work as educators matter? What about our student’s actions, today and later on? What if they become the next Isamo Noguchi, Maya Angelou, Grace Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Georgia O’Keefe, James Baldwin, Diego Rivera, or Thomas Edison? Is that important? Would someone else not have taken that place and done that or sufficiently similar work? And what about the smaller efforts that we and our students make to improve our worlds? Are we making those worlds? Are they making us? Something in between? M. Hanchett Hanson (B) Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Jorge-Artigau Austral University, Pilar, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_3

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Agency is a central issue underlying the modern concept of creativity—the relationship of agency to change in our personal lives and in our larger worlds. Agency can be conceptualized in extreme terms as individualism or in more circumscribed terms as limited options within larger systems. Likewise, deterministic forces can be seen as absolute or partial. These big, philosophical questions are also important to education, particularly in the calls to teach, nurture or promote creativity. Are we advocating individualism as much creativity rhetoric as traditionally implied? Are we just part of a system that has turned toward socially engineering people to become idea generators as many of the promoted methods for teaching creativity imply? Or are we equipping students to understand the deterministic forces of their worlds and exercise agency as they participate in, encounter, and/or resist those systems? We may not know how to answer definitively the questions of creative agency versus determinism, and we have to consider that the answers may differ by time and place. We do, however, have ways to explore these questions. One method is the case study, a detailed examination of exactly what happens when people do creative work. As opposed to broad-brush historical declarations or hidden experimental assumptions, the fine details examined in cases of how people actually do creative work give nuance to our questions of agency and determinism. As we will discuss later, case studies can also be used within education. As it turns out, this consideration of case study research puts us in a recursive position. For, in the history of creativity research, a particular man was a leading voice in his use and refinement of the method to explore his burning interest in the issues of agency, determinism and morality. And he conducted that research through the concept of creativity. That man was Howard Gruber. This chapter unpacks the important role case studies can play in understanding the power, limits, and vicissitudes of creativity by examining Gruber’s own case.

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Gruber’s Emerging Point of View In 1997 at age 75, Howard Gruber sat for an interview with Mary Lee Grisanti. One of the first issues they discussed was his perspective on the individual. Creativity was important to Gruber because he believed that individuals had the potential to make a difference. His knowledge of Gestalt psychology allowed him to see the interactions between parts and the whole, but his own inquiries repeatedly led him back to questions of how the parts affect the whole. He believed that the capacity to have an impact was necessary for the idea of morality to have meaning. If individuals could make an impact, then what they did mattered. But his view was not based on individualism, in the sense of people as decontextualized units that acted on the world. Far from it. Later in the same interview, he recalled that when he joined the APA Directory, in 1950, the interests that characterized his work were “perception, thinking and group processes” (Grisanti, 1997, p. 221). As that list reflects, the relations between individuals and groups were at the heart of Gruber’s work from early on. Starting at an early age, Gruber had studied Marxist theories. His readings led him to appreciate the power of historical dynamics but also to a discomfort with history as a predetermined script. In the Marxist paradigm, the individual was an expression of historical forces, not an independent actor. The social activism that Gruber associated with Marxism had a moral dimension, and for morality to have meaning individual action could not be predetermined. This tension between the power of socio-historical forces and individual agency became generative for Gruber through the idea of creativity. Expanding on a formulation attributed to Kant, ought implies can, Gruber (1993) contended that “ought implies can implies create” (p. 3). In a predictable world, the individual has the possibility to act in compliance with what should be done. The complexity of the world constrains what we can do but also compels us to do. Creativity is needed in order to envision solutions that do not yet exist. Gruber’s vision of the relation between the possible and the creative came from case studies–beginning with cases he read as a student and, over time, becoming more central to his research. To unpack his views

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and their legacy on creativity research today, we will approach his own work as a case study. The case will be divided in three parts. The first considers how Gruber came to his perspective on creative development using a tool he developed, the network of enterprise. Then we will look at the theories that came out of that work: the evolving systems approach, which Gruber and his associates developed, and the distributed and participatory frameworks of creativity that Gruber’s work has inspired. We will then turn to the educational implications of this work.

Network of Enterprise From the case studies researched by Gruber and his students, the idea of the network of enterprise emerged as a way of mapping the outlines of a person’s creative development (Gruber, 1989b; Gruber & Wallace, 1999). By looking at what someone actually does over time in relation to the ultimate outcome, we get a picture of how different strands of work are organized and inform one another. In hindsight the process may look relatively straightforward, but in life it is complex. The person doing the work has opportunities, works within constraints, and makes choices that direct the work toward the person’s creative purpose while also defining that purpose—a feedback loop. Within this complex system, chance and time also contribute to purpose. The surrounding environment offers a variety of resources that might inspire the work to take a new direction. An idea can be acquired but not fully integrated for some time. At the end of day, all the pieces may come together in a new, emergent perspective. The connection of all these endeavors form a web that Gruber defined as the network of enterprise. When we apply the concept of the network of enterprise to Gruber himself, we find an amplifying recursive system: one informed by systems theories and resulting in a new view and application of those theories. Gruber’s work also pointed beyond the systems concepts he was using toward more advanced complexity theories. Figure 3.1 provides a schematic overview of Gruber’s network of enterprise from his late teens to his 70s.

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Fig. 3.1 Gruber’s network of enterprise

Figure 3.1 shows the interactions of Gruber’s major enterprises, contributing to his evolving systems approach to case study method and the associated principles of creative development, including his work on creativity in the moral domain. In particular, the bases of systems theories came from Gruber’s interest in historical materialism as a youth, his work within the holistic approach of Gestalt perceptual research and his extensive understanding of Piaget’s systems theory of development—all contributing to the evolving systems approach and case study method. Gruber’s social activism and his evolving systems principles helped structure his interest in creativity in the moral domain, while his critique of historical materialism led him to investigate the role of individual moral agency.

From Historical Materialism to Gestalt Holism Gruber had a passion for big ideas from early in life. He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family that later became Reform. By the time he was in high school, he had declared himself an atheist. In his early teens,

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he expanded his view of the world, in part with the help of his sister’s boyfriend, who introduced him to a range of new ideas, from physics to Marxism. From this mentorship, Gruber gained the general notion that his own cultivation went beyond doing well in school. In college, he studied with renowned Gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch and read the then unpublished manuscript of Wertheimer’s (1945) Productive Thinking. Gestalt theory focused on perception from a holistic view, the relation of parts to whole (the gestalt ) being the primary concern. Wertheimer’s book on productive thinking was a broader consideration of development and problem-solving from a Gestalt perspective (see discussion in Hanchett Hanson, 2019a). The end of the book included case studies of Gauss, Galileo, and Einstein. Gruber would focus, not as much on Wertheimer’s conclusions, as on a question the cases suggested. How long does it take to think? (Grisanti, 1997). Wertheimer’s book was the first time Gruber remembered case studies as having an impact on his thinking.

Piaget and Systemic Development The Gestalt holistic theory implied a systems perspective, and, thus, began to address Gruber’s desire to expand his view of historical materialism to consideration of the individual, perception, and action. The emphasis on systems would soon expand further. In the 1950s, Gruber had received a grant to study the history of science in Britain. He wanted to develop a case study of the groundbreaking physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, but Gruber found that his own understanding of the underlying science was not sufficiently strong to do justice to the case. Toward the end of the year, Gruber went to Geneva and met the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (Grisanti, 1997). Gruber, who was fluent in French, had read some of Piaget’s work and recalled that the older psychologist liked him in part because they could speak French together. The two men also spoke the same language in their emphasis on the links of psychology to philosophic concerns. Gruber’s trip to Geneva marked the beginning of a long association. He would translate a

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number of Piaget’s works into English, and The Essential Piaget: An Interpretive Reference and Guide that Gruber and Jacques Vonèche published in 1977 would be a major influence in how Piaget was interpreted in America (Hanchett Hanson, 2005). For many years, much of Gruber’s work involved going back and forth to Geneva, while also teaching Piaget in America and translating Piaget.

The Cognitive Revolution A psychologist in his 30s with a revolutionary bent, Gruber did not focus just on Piaget. During those same years, Gruber organized conferences at the University of Colorado that would be “the opening gun in the cognitive revolution that was to follow” (Bruner, 2003, p. 590), according to Jerome Bruner who was at one of the conferences. The first conference was about cognition in general, taking on the prevailing school of behaviorism (Bruner et al., 1957). The second conference examined some of the same issues but with a specific focus on creativity (Gruber et al., 1962).

The Darwin Case In addition, Gruber was working on a major case study. After abandoning the study of Faraday, Gruber turned somewhat reluctantly to Charles Darwin. Initially, Gruber did not see Darwin as being particularly creative, but in examining Darwin’s extensive notebooks, Gruber became intrigued. He would spend almost 15 years writing the case, which was, in part, an exploration of his question of how long it takes to think. The case was also an extension of Piagetian systems-based principles of child development to lifespan creative development. In keeping with his own theory, Gruber’s emerging point of view gained a new level of coherence in his groundbreaking book, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (1974). Though Gruber’s work in studying the development of Darwin’s views on the evolution of man, Gruber was developing his own evolving systems approach. This perspective invites us to understand creative thinking as

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work, a process developed over extended periods of time through which a person builds a new point of view. The work is seldom straightforward. It involves guesses, blind alleys, frustrations, and, sometimes, long pauses. Creativity does not come down to a moment of sudden insight. There may be many aha! experiences, some that ultimately prove right and many others, wrong (Gruber, 1974, 1989b; Gruber & Davis, 1988). The new point of view emerges from this difficult, exciting, and often frustrating work and can have an impact on larger societal systems of meaning, large or small. These conclusions came from analyses of many cases by Gruber, his students and associates over decades, but Darwin served as the first example. Darwin explored partial explanations and blind alleys for several years. He struggled to understand even his own insights. Gruber found that Darwin wrote the idea of natural selection in his notebooks twice, seven months before realizing its import. Part of the struggle was that Darwin was looking for the causes of species variation, which he never found. (He did not know of Mendel’s work.) Natural selection did not answer the variation question so Darwin was not attuned to the importance of defining the mechanism of selection, even when he found it. When he did understand, he wrote up the idea and put it away for 10 years in part, Gruber argued, because of fear of public reaction. Finally turning back to the theory of natural selection, he started writing a multi-volume tome that would have taken many years to complete and would not have had the impact of On the Origin of Species. It was the discovery of natural selection by the younger naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, that spurred Darwin into more direct action (Gruber, 1974).

Experimental Epistemology Gruber himself provides another example of emergence of ideas over time and through work. In his dissertation, Gruber coined the term experimental epistemology to describe his work (Grisanti, 1997). This was the path he wanted to follow, even though he was unsure of the full implications of his own term. It was similar to “evolution” for Darwin, a commitment which Gruber was defining through his work. His search

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to understand his own idea would lead him to the idea of creativity and, later, provide another level of relevance to the work of Piaget who called his own research “genetic epistemology” (Gruber & Vonèche, 1977/1995). Until working with Piaget, Gruber had not been thinking of experimental epistemology or of creativity as developmental processes (Grisanti, 1997). Over time and through work, development, creativity and epistemology came together in the evolving systems approach. Like Darwin, Gruber gathered pieces of the puzzle, but it took time to make sense of the picture that was in front of him. Note the many constraints here, compared to heroic narratives of individualist creative genius. Neither Darwin nor Gruber fully understood their goals at the onset of the work, and the paths their work took were not direct. They had goals, projects, and plans but no real map. Instead, they were committed to ideas they could not fully define and searched their present worlds to give those ideas meaning, unaware of what would emerge from the work. Gruber synthesized the unlikely combination of historical materialism, systems-based views of development and his concerns with morality as agency. In contrast, Darwin’s work seems inevitable in hindsight. His insight into natural selection was little more than the combination of the death of non-adaptive mutations, a well-established fact known as “natural selection” in Darwin’s day, and the idea of artificial selection through breeding, a much older practice (Gruber, 1974). Nevertheless, Darwin had difficulty coming to the insight and understanding its importance once he had it. Wallace graciously acknowledged that, even though he had the same insight, he did not have the background to write a piece as powerful as On the Origin of Species (Raby, 2002). But Darwin would not have written it without Wallace’s work to motivate his writing a relatively short and accessible version of the theory. Finally, without either Wallace or Darwin, the theory itself would have, no doubt, been discovered. Gruber, therefore, saw Darwin’s contribution as influencing the speed and way in which the theory of evolution unfolded (Grisanti, 1997). Darwin’s specific, unique ability was, then, to have the idea and be in a position to consolidate so much evidence in one powerful statement of the theory, the result of his network of enterprise. The contribution was limited but important.

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For a developing point of view, drawing on ideas articulated by other people (an aspect of the social distribution of thought) can be important, as described above. Distinctions can also be important. Gruber noted that a key difference between his view and that of Piaget was the role of community. Piaget acknowledged the social context of development, but he focused almost entirely on individuals. Gruber believed that it was important to study individuals as well as their communities. This view was based on theory and praxis.

Social Activism From early in his career, Gruber was active in the streets as well as the classroom. Politics and morality went hand in hand for him, and he participated in different forms of social activism throughout his life. As a young professor at the University of Colorado, Gruber was already involved in community action. He joined students who were protesting the enlargement of a new building that would deprive the community view of the mountains. In the 1950s, he helped organize the largest chapter of an international organization, the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which stood against nuclear policies under the guidance of Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling (Hanchett Hanson, 2005). Later, Gruber was active in the protests against the Vietnam War, including the protests in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Political Convention (Hanchett Hanson, 2005). Gruber’s activism tied directly to his moral concerns which, as previously discussed, were also fundamental to his interest in creativity. These lines of interest came together explicitly in his later published work, along with the fully-developed evolving systems approach (e.g., Gruber, 1989a, 1993). As shown in Fig. 3.1, most of Gruber’s writing about the moral domain came later in his career, but the question of morality was a driving force from early in his work.

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Evolving Systems In Darwin on Man Gruber articulated most of the key principles of what he would later call the evolving systems approach to case study method (Gruber, 1989b; Gruber & Wallace, 1999). He then worked with doctoral students on other cases as well working himself on a case of his mentor, Piaget. From these studies, the more detailed evolving systems principles and method emerged, hand-in-glove. The methodology and its principles allowed future researchers to analyze new cases that would differ in kind of work (domain), type of data available, and focus of inquiry.

The Individual as Evolving System The key principles included viewing the individual as an evolving system with loosely coupled subsystems of knowledge, affect and purpose (Gruber, 1989b). Of these, purpose was both a driving force and developing alongside the other subsystems. The totality of the person’s point of view—what developed in creative development—emerged dialectically in relation to the work, as the Darwin case and others had shown. Purpose was not just key to the emerging point of view. Purpose was crucial to agency itself—a factor that could moderate the determinism of historical dynamics. In the conclusion of Darwin on Man (1974), Gruber wrote: “The evolution of enduring purposes partially decouples the individual from his [sic] environment. But he is not entirely free, only free to choose among possible things: attainable goals and feasible paths to reach them” (p. 252). With the development of purpose, agency—and therefore morality and creativity—become possible. In the evolving systems approach, these became developmental achievements, rather than a priori conditions. As a system, a person’s point of view has to have slowly changing or fixed commitments, to maintain both coherence and stability, allowing long-term work, and to provide a framework for evaluating and elaborating on the quickly changing ideas and perceptions that come from

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stream of consciousness (Gruber, 1974). People doing creative work cannot throw away everything they know each time a new idea appears. Instead, there is a slower process that takes place through complex interactions of the person’s knowledge, affect and purpose. Even relatively sudden, major changes that move the whole system do not completely erase all fundamental commitments. There has to be some type of continuity for the person to maintain coherent identity and for the transformation itself to have meaning (Gruber, 1974).

Method In keeping with the lifespan developmental view and the emphasis on complex systems, Gruber chose case studies as his method. Stake (1995), who has taken a constructivist approach in keeping with Gruber, has argued that the value of case study research is in examination of the systemic complexity of carefully chosen examples. This is a function that most other social science methodologies do not serve. Indeed, most emphasize the opposite in isolating variables to achieve generalizable findings about those variables, apart from complexities of context.

Studying the Organization of Work The first step in any evolving systems case is mapping the network of enterprise. The base data is what the person did over time, in what order, using what resources. How different lines of work—enterprises—aligned and related to each other over time is also crucial. As we saw in Gruber’s network of enterprise, different activities often inform one another in the development of a person’s point of view where timing can be important. For example, Darwin’s aha! moment concerning natural selection came when he reread Malthus’s theories of population growth. The timing of a renewed encounter with Malthus’s ideas allowed Darwin to see the importance of his own idea, which, as we have already noted, he had articulated in his notes months before. How the people studied in evolving systems cases perceived their own purposes is also of interest, but not always as important as one might

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think. Using Darwin as example again, he was looking for the causes of species variation but found the mechanisms of variation selection. Note the irony: sense of purpose is crucial to agency, as previously discussed, but the understanding one’s purpose at any given time is partial and transient. Since it emerges through work, interactions with the world, purpose is not entirely within the individual. It is an exploration and negotiation with the world. Looking back on the development of the network of enterprise, after the fact, however, provides a mapping of the development of purpose (Gruber & Wallace, 1999). The network of enterprise outlines the story of the person’s negotiation with the world through decisions, opportunities, frustrations, uses of resources and investment of energy that ultimately defined the work and the emerging point of view. By elaborating on the base data of the network of enterprise, many other issues can then be investigated, such as development of specific themes within the work, particular relationships or experiences that served as resources or obstacles, and uses and management of affect.

Generalizability of Findings Although the core value of case studies is understanding the systemic complexity of the specific situation, Stake (1995) has defined two types of generalization than cases can provide: the patterns of behavior that apply only within the scope of the case (petit generalizations) and those that identify alignments with, or exceptions to, findings from other research (grand generalizations). Specific work habits, favorite metaphors, affective cycles, or repeated sources of inspiration might be petit generalizations within a case. A case might also explore how a person made a major breakthrough early in a career. Those findings would then inform the conclusion of other research that, usually, breakthroughs come after extended periods of intensive work, the socalled 10-year rule (Weisberg, 2006). The example provided by the case, showing an alternative of how work can (not necessarily will) develop, would then be a grand generalization. The case example adds nuance to the other research and suggests further research questions.

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Coming from a more positivist perspective, Yin (2018) has proposed analytic generalization as a goal of case studies. His view in part overlaps with Stake’s definition of grand generalizations, which amounts to situating case findings in relation to existing theories. Yin goes further, however, in arguing that the patterns found within a given case should then apply to other similar situations. That claim goes beyond Gruber’s conceptions of the unique case for creative work. (For an extended comparison of Stake & Yin, see Yazan, 2015.)

Generalized Questions Instead of transfer of findings in the form of analytic generalization, evolving systems poses a set of questions that can be asked of any case of creative work. How were resources organized over time (the network of enterprise)? What techniques did the person use to identify, evaluate and elaborate new ideas (deviation amplification techniques)? What other patterns show up in the person’s work, such as favored heuristics or metaphors, routines, and so on (petit generalizations)? In keeping with this view, Feldman et al. (1994) recognized the importance of case studies in bringing about “middle level concepts,” such as the construct of network of enterprise, which can serve to understand the complexity of creative work and be applied as tools for new cases. In sum, the constructivists view of case studies, advocated by Gruber and others, provides a crucial understanding of issues that complement other research, aiming at an ever-more nuanced perspective on relevant questions across methodologies. Yin, in contrast, seems to want case studies to compete with other methods.

Legacy: Distributed and Participatory Creativity Through the evolving systems approach, Gruber himself made an impact, challenging our understanding of creativity. Since his death in 2005, others have noted the value of his insights and built on his work.

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Gruber has provided a basis for thinking about the individual, exercising agency as part of larger societal and historical systems. Specifically, distributed creativity (Gl˘aveanu, 2014) and participatory creativity (e.g., Clapp, 2017; Clapp & Hanchett Hanson, 2019; Hanchett Hanson, 2015, 2019b; Hanchett Hanson & Clapp, 2020; Hanchett Hanson et al., 2021) have filled out the picture of how individuals do creative work, not in spite of, but through and in relation to social, material, and historical dynamics—even when resisting power structures. These theorists are explicitly elaborating on Gruber’s work, but they are also returning to his original vision. He and his colleagues originally aimed their research at “the cognitive economy as a whole” (Gruber & Davis, 1988, p. 246). While maintaining that this ideal should be kept in mind, the researchers found that the goal was too large for case studies, which need more narrow focus. Any case study must still have focus, but the broader distributed and participatory frameworks have provided a context in which to place the focus. These frameworks make the implications of Gruber’s approach more explicit, using complexity theory as a basis of analysis. Inspired by Gruber, these newer distributed and participatory views of creativity use complex systems theories. This aspect of the newer theories is an updating of terms and principles. Gruber used a meteorological analogy—a classic example of complex systems—to describe creativity. Inverting the usual metaphor of inspiration as a sudden bolt of lightning, Gruber noted the complex weather dynamics that had to develop over time to result in the momentary occurrence of lightning (Gruber & Davis, 1988). Complex systems involve multiple relationships among system components resulting in processes that are non-linear. Ideas emerge from interactions among components and across levels of a system. Similarly, Gruber conceived thought as a multi-level, dynamic system: “Every experience occurs at many different levels: perceptual-sensational, perceptual-thinking, historical. Thinking really involves a movement from one level to another, moving back and forth among different levels” (Grisanti, 1997, p. 226). Such dynamic structures made up a person’s point of view. In his research Gruber noted what seemed to be initial formulations of ideas, but singular ideas only have meaning

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within a point of view. His primary concern was the changing structure of thought in which the significance of each idea was defined by “the structure of ideas, or arguments, of which it is a part” (Gruber, 1974, p. 6). One final point: The relationship between complexity and creativity runs both ways. Complex systems theories can add to our understanding of creativity, and creativity theory can elaborate systems perspectives. Gruber’s contemporary and systems theorist Gregory Bateson (1972) wrote: “No doubt deeper levels of the mind guide the scientist or the artist toward the experiences and thoughts which are relevant to those problems which are somehow his, and this guidance seems to operate long before the scientist has any conscious knowledge of his goals. But how this happens we do not know” (p. xxiv). Gruber studied how it happens.

Educational Implications Evolving systems was concerned with holistic, lifespan development which carries implications for education, and the distributed and participatory views that have grown out of Gruber’s work have addressed issues of education more directly (e.g., Clapp, 2017; Clapp & Hanchett Hanson, 2019; Hanchett Hanson, 2015, 2019b). To apply these views to the goal of helping develop creativity within education requires a considerable shift in thinking. Divergent thinking tests and brainstorming, or other ideation exercises, are not only insufficient. They are not even directly relevant. The shift is away from trying to make students into ideation machines and toward making them effective participants in change. The bad news is that the new approaches are more complicated and nuanced than giving a 30-min divergent thinking test or just teaching fun ways to come up with new ideas. The good news is that the approaches to creativity proposed here support and advance the transfer of knowledge of practical skills within education. The participatory creativity framework can also accommodate, in different forms and with different

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meaning, ideation practices that were previously used to advance divergent thinking and other theories (Hanchett Hanson, 2013). As opposed to being told continually to get outside of their “boxes” of experience, knowledge and understanding of the world—the stuff of education— students would focus on integrating all of their experiences in building distinctive points of view (their “boxes”), appreciating how their points of view can contribute to change, and finding the environments where they will be of most value. Issues at the core of evolving systems and distributed and participatory views drive this shift: long-term and holistic perspectives on learning; working in complex distributed systems; encouraging individuality without resorting to individualism; and using case studies as models.

Long-Term and Holistic Perspectives on Learning Developmental psychology often means the study of children, aligning with the focus of Gruber’s own mentor, Piaget. The study of creative work as lifespan development, however, gives us a new perspective with which to consider education. Lifelong learning has been an increasingly popular topic during the Internet age (e.g., Dede & Richards, 2020; Jarvis, 2007), but it has always been the norm for people doing creative work. (For discussion and examples, see Hanchett Hanson et al., 2021; see also examples in Wallace & Gruber, 1989.) If we want education to nurture creativity, it needs to contribute explicitly to a lifelong process: the development of distinctive and well-educated points of view. Often, people who do creative work learn conventions—sometimes the very conventions they want to change—from formal, classroom education. They learn facts, together with key takeaways that include underlying questions and controversies. For formal education to facilitate a lifelong learning process, rather than leaving it entirely up to individual students, the facts need to be connected to the bigger questions which those facts address. The goal is an approach to lifelong learning that builds on foundations from formal education. As Gruber and Davis (1988) described, people doing long-term creative work tend to pursue large issues, not just

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isolated projects, as mapped by the network of enterprise. The work has to be organized so “that success along the way does not lead so much to a sense of satisfaction as to a sense of liberation—to do whatever comes next” (p. 267). To establish that dynamic, learning needs to be intrinsically connected to questions in the learner’s mind. To facilitate creativity seriously in this long-term, developmental approach, everyone has to be aware of the process and goals, from policymakers to students. Especially the students. A teacher or school may guide the learning process for a semester or year or many years, but for most of the students’ lives, they will have to guide the process of the lifelong learning that goes with creative work. This point is logical and, again, supported by Gruber’s own case. The realization that he was responsible for his own cultivation, which went beyond doing well in school, was a crucial moment. He was only 12 years old when his sister’s boyfriend inspired this insight. It served him the rest of his life, and at age 75 he remembered it as pivotal to his development (Grisanti, 1997). Gruber’s analysis of lifelong creative development was also holistic: all aspects of experience contributed. Here, the rightfully emphasized issue of diversity comes into play. From a participatory creativity perspective, Clapp (2017) has advocated emphasizing the “biography of the idea” (p. 91), rather than biographies of people who contribute to the work. This approach can broaden perspective and discourage the tendency to attribute all of the work to lone “geniuses.” In the end, though, all students need to value their own individuality and bring their personal experiences to the classroom. Deconstructing the idea of genius by focusing on ideas is not enough. The students also need models of how they can understand and appreciate their own individuality.

Individuality in Complex Distributed Systems Much of the discourse around creativity in education has been based on individualism. The student is treated as a container of creative potential decontextualized from immediate environment, sometimes tested for divergent thinking, and placed on a normative scale based on the

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score. Alternatively, students may be evaluated for creative work, but— usually in keeping with attitudes of the overall educational system—the creativity is still treated as within the individual. Gruber’s view of creative development and the subsequent distributed and participatory views suggest different approaches. Individuality is different from individualism and is at the core of what each person can creatively contribute to a given group, problem, or movement. Individuality is context-dependent, different in a group of generally like-minded people, where a person’s individuality may be more about personal style, than in a more diverse group, where the same person’s individuality may be style as well as the substance of distinctive information and experience. Here, again, the newer views can support educational goals. Most curricula today include collaboration skills as desired learning outcomes. From an ideology of individualism, such skills can be viewed as communication issues in finding compromises between “my” ideas and “your” ideas. From a participatory perspective, the goal is to bring all of the resources of the collaborators to the emergence of new ideas. Being personally right or best or “leader” is not nearly as important as creating distributions of knowledge that can effectively bring about the desired changes. Indeed, helping to build such distributions is what constitutes leadership. In a further and important twist, “change” will emerge from existing knowledge and experience, adding weight to the value of everyone’s point of view, always built on personal experience.

Case Studies Finally, students can learn about how distributed systems work by asking questions about those systems in relation to biographies that are often presented in the old “genius” mold. Because every case of creativity is different, such study does not provide replicable formulas. As the evolving systems method has shown, such re-examinations of the lives of people can help students understand the questions that can apply to any creative work, including their own. This approach can also bring to life the understanding that many people contribute to any piece of creative

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work, not just the person who ultimately gets the credit. In combination with Clapp’s biography of the idea, conducting case studies of specific people in the participatory framework can be a powerful learning experience (See further discussion in Clapp & Hanchett Hanson, 2019; Hanchett Hanson, 2019b).

Conclusion This chapter is meant to model the point described above—the importance of case studies to understanding the challenges of creativity. It is not just Gruber’s theoretical conclusions that make his work important. The path he took gave depth and complexity to his work. The Darwin case, other cases he developed with students and, as highlighted here, his own life’s work illustrate creative development as an evolving and distributed system. The systems approach leads us to new ways of thinking about educational practices meant to encourage the development of creativity. The view of creativity within education changes from simply teaching ideation techniques to helping students understand and participate in complex, distributed systems of change. Students will not be simply receivers of such lessons but active participants and, therefore, must themselves understand the issues: the value, affordances and challenges of the long-term development of their points of view; the complex distributed systems from which change will emerge and of which they are participants; and the relation of their individuality to different social contexts and types of problems, helping define their potential contributions through creative work. There is no single, final answer to the questions of agency and determinism, but, given that the topic here is creativity, we have an interest in exploring the potential of agency. Gruber’s life work, the evolving systems approach, and case studies more generally, have helped inform the questions we pose about how a person’s sense of purpose develops and how purpose may enable agency, without denying that there are large at least partially determining forces at play. In other words, the questions

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continue to be refined through case study work (Hanchett Hanson et al., 2021). Alongside agency, Gruber’s question of morality is inevitably relevant. Creativity is generally defined as novel ideas or practices that have value, and “value” almost always has a moral dimension. Evolving systems’ developmental principles emerged from Gruber’s interest in how people could have an impact on their worlds. In the processes of participating, we come to understand the changes we want, our purpose. That purpose then facilitates the agency that allows moral action. This dynamic process both comes from the work and helps sustain the work, a way of engaging our worlds as participants that can make a difference.

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Hanchett Hanson, M. (2019b). Navigating the ideology of creativity in education. In R. A. Beghetto & G. E. Corazza (Eds.), Dynamic perspectives on creativity: New directions for theory, research, and practice in education (pp. 279–96). Springer. Hanchett Hanson, M., & Clapp, E. P. (2020). Participatory creativity. In M. A. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.), The encyclopedia of creativity, 3rd edn. (pp. 300– 304). Elsevier. Hanchett Hanson, M., Amato, A., Durani, A., Hoyden, J., Koe, S., Sheagren, E., & Yang, Y. (2021). Creativity and improvised educations: Case studies for understanding impact and implications. Routledge. Jarvis, P. (2007). Globalization, lifelong learning and the learning society: Sociological perspectives. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203964408 Raby, P. (2002). Alfred Russel Wallace: A life. Princeton University Press. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage. Wallace, D. B., & Gruber, H. E. (Eds.). (1989). Creative people at work: Twelve cognitive case studies. Oxford University Press. Weisberg, R. W. (2006). Modes of expertise in creative thinking: Evidence from case studies. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. J. Feltovich, & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 761–787). Cambridge University Press. Wertheimer, M. (1945). Productive thinking. Harper & Brothers, Publishers. Yazan, B. (2015). Three approaches to case study methods in education: Yin, Merriam, and Stake. The Qualitative Report, 20 (2), 134–152. Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods. Sage.

4 Developing Intelligence and Creativity in Education: Insights from the Space–Time Continuum Giovanni Emanuele Corazza , Frédéric Darbellay , Todd Lubart , and Chiara Panciroli

Introduction During the two hundred years that spanned the second half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, the first and second industrial revolutions revealed clear trends for humanity: in the Industrial Society, standardization was at a prime. In fact, only the identification of standard products and procedures made it possible to reach the large production quantities and low prices that characterize any G. E. Corazza (B) DEI-Marconi Institute for Creativity, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. E. Corazza · T. Lubart LAPEA, Université de Paris, Boulogne-Billancourt, France LAPEA, University Gustave Eiffel, Versailles, France T. Lubart e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_4

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industry-based economic system. Introducing the commercial perspective, this also required a massification of taste, in order to be able to sell in large numbers quasi-identical products, which gave rising importance to advertising and marketing. As a consequence, that historical epoch saw a strong push toward abandoning artisanship and tailor-made work in all of their forms and competencies. At the same time, a clear trend emerged toward the concentration of the population in cities, with a consequent drop in population density for rural areas. Life in cities required a minimum level of education and competencies in order to survive. Resolving the plague of analphabetism and bringing the average cultural level of the general population up to the level required in this modern form of society was a fundamental goal. All of these factors led to the design of what today can be identified as the Traditional Education System (TES), the general goal of which could be summarized as: obtaining standard levels of homogeneous knowledge for all students, irrespective of their social class. A strong disciplinary view was developed, based on the assumption that separating subjects would increase the efficiency of the overall learning process. From the point of view of psychological constructs, such TES was clearly geared toward the development of the intelligence of students, where intelligence is here defined as a “context-embedded phenomenon requiring goal-directed effectiveness” (Corazza & Lubart, 2021). The goals are certainly discipline dependent. For example, basic goals include reading, writing, and performing simple calculations. The above general definition contains as particular cases many other definitions of intelligence, including Gottfredson’s (1997) definition: “Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to F. Darbellay Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Unit, Center for Children’s Rights Studies, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] C. Panciroli EDU Department, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

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reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning , a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings – ‘catching on,’ ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.”

Education in the Industrial and Information Societies Developing intelligence has a number of positive correlates in terms of knowledge (i.e., knowing about the state-of-the-art in various disciplines), culture (i.e., developing a sense of belonging to a cultural milieu), competencies (i.e., possessing skills and expertise for professional success), decision making (i.e., being able to make fast and correct decisions, also under pressure), learning how to learn (i.e., developing interest, independence and effectiveness in acquiring new knowledge), and minimizing energy (i.e., spending the least possible amount of energy to complete tasks, to maximize survival). In TES, creativity is not an explicit objective and is typically left to indirect development through the arts. Indeed, a creative student in TES might even receive low grades or be punished for mind wandering, slow responses, or failing to provide the expected answers. Similarly, transdisciplinarity is not a requirement for TES, as different subjects are measured as if they were independent fields of knowledge. On the other hand, starting from the second half of the twentieth century, information and communication technologies (ICT) have been introduced in society, interconnecting people and devices, and this technological disruption has caused in fact a revolution in social and cultural trends: standardization is now replaced by personalization, whereas concentration is substituted by destructuring of space and time (Corazza et al., 2010). The fundamental and underlying trend is that ICT technologies tend to transform information into a commodity, at the disposal of anyone who enjoys digital connectivity. Although information and knowledge should not and cannot be confused, it is true that in this new milieu the distinction between humans beings cannot

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be related any longer to the static possession of facts and know-how, because information gaps can be filled in no time, thanks to the available technological support. Rather, in the Information Society human dignity tends to be tied to the creative transformation of knowledge, starting from a shared layer of extant information. The main consequence of this fact is that creativity, to which we assign a dynamic definition as “a context-embedded phenomenon requiring potential originality and effectiveness” (Corazza, 2016; Corazza & Lubart, 2021), has today become a democratic necessity, and cannot be considered anymore a special talent for an élite. It can also be argued that organic creativity is becoming the essential factor in determining well-being (Corazza, 2017). It should be then clear that there is today an urgent call for the formal introduction of creativity inside the education system. Developing creativity in education can be argued to bring a number of positive potential gains on the same axes intercepted by the development of intelligence, but with different correlates. The student should use his/her creativity to evolve in terms of knowledge (i.e., producing original and effective ideas in various disciplines), culture (i.e., expanding culture and creating cross-cultural connections), competencies (i.e., using skills for entrepreneurship and leadership), decision making (i.e., taking risks by deciding through intuition and imagination), learning how to innovate (i.e., acquiring systematic approaches to drive the creative thinking process), and capitalizing on energy (i.e., investing more energy in specific areas to explore beyond conventional knowledge). The comparison of educational correlates related to the development of intelligence and creativity is reported in Table 4.1. Two observations about Table 4.1 are fundamental. First, it is clear that these correlates should be considered as ‘educational trends’, in the sense that an education system geared toward the ‘pure’ development of a specific correlate would tend to bring these correlates as a general consequence. Second, a little reflection is needed to realize that these correlates are not mutually orthogonal. For example, it is difficult to produce socially recognized creative ideas in a discipline if one has not acquired the state-of-the-art knowledge in that domain at a sufficient level. Similarly, in terms of developing and exploiting competencies, the distinction between professional success and a career as an entrepreneur is clearly blurred. The consequence of this overlap

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Table 4.1 Main correlates to the development of the intelligence and creativity constructs

Knowledge

Culture

Correlates to intelligence-oriented development

Correlates to creativity-oriented development

Acquire state-of-the-art knowledge in various disciplines Sense of belonging to a cultural milieu, pride

Use knowledge across disciplines to produce creative ideas Expand culture and build cross-cultural associations Develop skills for entrepreneurship and leadership Take risks based on facts and intuition Learn how to innovate Spend excess energy to allow for exploration beyond convention

Competencies

Develop skills for professional success

Decision making

Make best decisions based on facts Learn how to learn Spend minimum energy to maximize survival

Learning Energy

is that, before one can start to design a new form of education system, it is of fundamental importance to understand the relationship between intelligence and creativity.

On the Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity There is abundant scientific literature on the study of the relationship between intelligence and creativity, which shows that these two fundamental constructs are neither identical nor mutually orthogonal (see Corazza & Lubart, 2021, for a review). However, in spite of all this work, the conditions and the modalities through which intelligence and creativity interact are still in need of clarification. This problem is urgent when one considers the necessity for the design of a novel education system, and it is useful to quote Sternberg (1999) in order to understand the level of this challenge (p. 87): “Despite a substantial body of research, psychologists still have not reached a consensus on the nature of the relation

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between creativity and intelligence […]. The question is theoretically important, and its answer probably affects the lives of countless children and adults. We therefore need elucidation of good answers as soon as possible.” We believe that an important step in the clarification of the relationship between the intelligence and creativity constructs was proposed by (Corazza & Lubart, 2021). Starting from the definitions of intelligence and creativity reported above, and introducing a taxonomy for context embedding the experience under observation based on the attributes of tightness and looseness, a new theoretical framework was introduced for the purpose of mapping intelligence and creativity over a bi-dimensional plane, identified as the space-time continuum. The two dimensions defining this plane take on the meaning of, respectively, conceptual space S and available time T for the experience under study. Given a certain task, space S corresponds to the conceptual domain which is expected to be spanned by the individual in search for the action of choice in response to this task. On the other hand, the available time T corresponds to the period over which the action is expected to occur. In general, both S and T can vary in terms of their tightness (i.e., presence of rigid rules and norms, with intolerance to violations) versus looseness (i.e., presence of flexible indications and tolerance for violations). The use of these attributes has been inspired by the work of Gelfand et al. (2011), in which they were used as tools for the analysis of societies. By crossing the two axes for S and T, the space-time continuum can be shown to contain four quadrants: tight space and tight time, loose space and tight time, tight space and loose time, loose space and loose time. Now, by mapping intelligence and creativity onto the four quadrants it is possible to clarify the conditions in which the two constructs are distinct and those in which they overlap, depending on the context characteristics, see Fig. 4.1. In other words, the clarification of the relationship between intelligence and creativity requires a clear specification of the context embedding these phenomena. As discussed in (Corazza & Lubart, 2021), once the general theoretical framework of the space-time continuum has been established, it can be used to draw inferences and indications for the understanding of developmental, educational, and professional environments that foster the expression of the two constructs. Our purpose here is to focus

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Fig. 4.1 Mapping Intelligence and Creativity over the ST-Continuum (from Corazza & Lubart, 2021)

on the application of the space-time continuum to the design of new educational systems that are optimized for the development of both intelligence and creativity. Before entering into this, it is important to review the existing efforts for the introduction of creativity in education systems.

Creativity in Education: A Conundrum Many institutions have recognized that in the twenty-first Century creativity has become an explicit objective for education systems, considering school, academia, and lifelong learning. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has been producing important position papers on this topic for nearly two decades (OECD, 2004, 2008, 2017, 2018), calling for creativity to become an essential part of the educational curricula. On the other hand, the World Economic

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Forum (WEF) in the last few years has been calling for a reskilling revolution, in which the development of the skills related to creativity and innovation has a major role (WEF, 2019). It should therefore not come as a surprise that many countries have started a process of introducing creativity inside their educational curricula: see Patston et al. (2021) for a qualitative analysis of the information on this process respectively provided by Australia, England, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and South Korea. In the scientific literature, many authors have argued about the necessity and the modalities for introducing creativity in education (Beghetto, 2010; Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014, 2016; Cropley, 2020; Ferrari & Wyse, 2016; Hennessey, 2015; Jeffrey & Craft, 2004; Renzulli & Renzulli, 2010; Runco, 2003; Sawyer, 2015; Smith & Smith, 2010; Torrance, 1963; Westby & Dawson, 1995). Many different alternatives are proposed, so that little agreement is found about how this objective should be pursued. A major distinction appears to be the horizontal vs. vertical approaches for introducing creativity. Whereas in the vertical approach creativity is conceived as a discipline of its own, the principles of which can then be applied to all other domains (Corazza et al., 2017), in the horizontal approach the aim is to distribute creativity in all subjects, in recognition of the domain-specific elements of the creative process (Baer, 2011). A second important differentiation concerns the creativity of the teacher that refers to how content is delivered, as opposed to the creativity of the student, that strives for the development of skills and to the modalities for assessing performance; this distinction can be resumed as creative teaching vs. creative learning (Jeffrey, 2006; Jeffrey & Craft, 2004). Unfortunately, the introduction of creativity in the education system is generally met with strong resistance by educational institutions, school principals, and teachers. Typical arguments that might be used as a response to these ideas include the following: ‘very interesting but I don’t have time’; ‘I wasn’t trained for this, what are the guidelines’; ‘assessment of this activity is impossible’; ‘we loose control of the class, there is no discipline’; ‘the effects might be marginal, and parents do not expect this’. In general, if a proposal comes in that entails a disruption of the extant system, this will find strong opposition. On the other hand, as we have

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discussed above, the real target is not to develop creativity and forget about intelligence, but to design a balanced system that is geared at the joint development of both intelligence and creativity. Showing how the space-time continuum can be used for the purpose of identifying such a balanced system, with its many possible nuances, is the goal of this contribution.

Applying the Space–Time Continuum to Education Any school system understood as a whole can be articulated according to the terms of a space-time continuum as presented above. The educational and pedagogical space designates a certain curricular organization of content, teaching and learning methods, didactics, evaluation practices, modalities of organization and functioning of the class, as well as differentiated postures of teachers and students. It is useful to note that, even though our understanding of space in our theoretical framework makes reference only to conceptual entities, from the point of view of an embedded cognition paradigm the physical space can also be included in the discussion, especially when it can be augmented with technology (Brooks, 2012). The notion of educational and pedagogical time designates the temporal organization of teaching–learning and assessment activities, individual and collaborative times, as well as short, medium, or longterm objectives and the pace and speed of learning. Referring to the ancient Greeks’ distinction between Chronos [κρ eνoς] and Kairós [´oαιρ´oς], our notion of educational and pedagogical time is intended to contain both Chronos, to indicate objective time that can be measured irrespective of experience, as well as Kairós, representing the subjective perception of the duration of an experience, an educational event characterized by a quality. Both variables of educational and pedagogical space and time can be respectively interpreted from the perspective of tightness vs looseness (Corazza & Lubart, 2021). A tight pedagogical space is characterized by its compliance with a standardized curriculum organization model

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in a pre-defined study plan, the latter being essentially provided by disciplinary didactics with marked teaching–learning methods and giving rise to mainly summative evaluations. Assessment follows rigid rules and can lead to failure for those who do not achieve the standard levels. The teacher’s posture is reinforced by a dominant and hierarchical approach to the teacher-learner relationship: the teacher knows and transmits: the pupil does not know and he/she learns. In terms of physical space, tightness is observed in learning spaces that are inflexible, indoors, and that do not favor embedded and embodied forms of learning. On the positive side, tightness in pedagogical space favors the development of crystallized intelligence, specialization, as well as the portability of knowledge across situations. Also, tightness in pedagogical space might be easier to manage from an organizational point of view. Conversely, a loose pedagogical space would be characterized by its distancing or even its non-compliance with a standardized curriculum organization model, responding to a more flexible study plan open to the unknown. Assessment is therefore more dynamic, open to discussion, tolerant with differences in achievement as a function of individual differences in capacity. If the disciplinary didactics can be operational and are by far not dominant, a loose pedagogical space tends to follow more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary logics (Darbellay, 2015; Darbellay et al., 2017; Klein, 2014) that guide the creative teaching– learning methods. The evaluation practices are formative and centered on the interests of the students. The teacher’s posture is also revised. This is not located in a dominant-dominated relationship; rather, it weaves a relationship that is certainly transmissive but also and above all of support, help, and trust with students: the teacher does not know everything, the student learns in a dynamic of exchange, both benevolent and demanding. Finally, a loose physical learning space is unstructured, typically outdoors, and allows for direct experiences that stimulate embedded and embodied learning. In terms of pedagogical time, tight time is dominated by Chronos, determining a linear organization of teaching–learning activities that follows the sacrosanct timetable of standard school programs, in days themselves divided into time slots each allocated to different disciplines

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which are assessed separately as autonomous units of knowledge capitalization. Delays in handing in students work are not tolerated, hence personal Kairós is disregarded. Given the tightness of schedules, activities tend to be mainly individual, and in principle conducted by different teachers in separate and rigid time slots. The teaching–learning objectives are mainly guided by imperatives and the urgency to follow the annual programs imposed by national structures as well as the deadlines set in terms of examinations and marks. The objectives relate first to the short and medium term. Long-term educational objectives on societal and global issues (sustainable development, climate change, health crisis, etc.) and the cross-disciplinary skills necessary for their understanding are admittedly recognized but not a priority compared to the learning of fundamental disciplinary knowledge. On the positive side, a tight control of time allows for a generally homogeneous advancement of a class, and trains the individual to respect deadlines, which could characterize one’s future life in professional endeavors. Definitely, tightness in pedagogical time allows easier management of study plans, of teaching assignments, and of assessment procedures. As a counterpoint, a loose pedagogical time is dominated by Kairós, leading to a non-linear and possibly juxtaposed organization of teaching– learning activities. The schedule of school programs is adapted according to activities centered on the interests of children as individuals and as a group. Chronos is not at a prime, so that delays are tolerated in favor of a respect for individual differences in learning pace. The Heideggerian relationship between time and care is very relevant when time is loose, breaking with the conception of temporality as an objective, static, irreversible datum and considering the duration of learning events as dependent on care and therefore on the interest of the individual. Formative evaluation promotes self- and mutual-evaluation by students of their individual and collective learning. Give that time is loose, the logic of extended projects allowing for the collaboration between students is encouraged, informed, and supervised by a group of teachers from an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective. The imperative and urgency that characterizes standardized programs are substituted by greater temporal flexibility and by the importance given to essentials. Examinations and grading are not educational purposes, they are only

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a non-priority means. Sensitivity to long-term challenges and issues is more pronounced, it is even an integral part of the program which aims to train students in skills in terms of creativity and softer skills. As explained previously, by crossing these four ideal–typical poles (Tight-Loose pedagogical Space vs. Tight-Loose pedagogical Time), we can specialize for educational purposes the space-time continuum introduced for the analysis of intelligence and creativity constructs in Corazza and Lubart (2021), identifying four quadrants which correspond to quite diverse educational and pedagogical styles, drawing more or less fixed or dynamic school forms, all against a background of differences and complementarities between intelligence and creativity in a school context. Each quadrant has specific characteristics that make it interesting and useful for the pursuit of specific learning and development goals. In the logic of the space-time continuum, we can outline the contents and shifting contours of these four quadrants, while also attempting to mapping different educational forms and types of more or less traditional or alternative pedagogies (Darbellay et al., 2019, 2021; Panciroli, 2020).

Mapping Pedagogies on the Space–Time Continuum The first quadrant, identified as TS-TT, crosses a Tight pedagogical Space and a Tight Time as defined above, implying a relatively classic and fixed spatio-temporal teaching–learning device, making full sense in the institutional framework of a Traditional Education System (TES). This corresponds precisely to the canonical “school form” (Vincent, 2008) which consists of a division of teaching and learning contents in a relatively compartmentalized and stable disciplinary system and in which the development of intellectual skills is dominant and governed by rigid time schedules, creativity being relatively excluded. The motivation and the capacity of the pupils, the division of space and time, the standards, the values and the behaviors expected of the actors of the education system, the didactics and the pedagogies, the evaluations, etc. are largely dictated by a top-down disciplinary and multidisciplinary logic. In economic

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terms, this would be the incumbent actor, one that is very difficult to challenge given its strength and tradition, and that certainly carries some positive features. But it is by no means the only possible model for education. Considering the Loose Space-Tight Time (LS-TT) pedagogical quadrant, while a traditional approach is maintained for scheduling of teaching and assessment, the educational space is opened for diversified experiences, alternative teaching, and learning styles, providing room for creativity in both teachers and students. In this quadrant it is conceivable that a vertical course on creativity (e.g., Corazza et al., 2017) is inserted without any other modification into a TES, specifically into its traditional time organization. Many of the above-discussed proposals for the introduction of creativity in schools could be mapped onto the LS-TT pedagogical quadrant. Both creativity and intelligence are developed in this quadrant. In a dual way, the Tight Space-Loose Time (TS-LT) pedagogical quadrant maintains a traditional organization in terms of disciplines and learning objectives, mainly oriented toward the development of intelligence and discipline-specific competencies, but allows for longer-term experiences, which produce various forms of project-based learning. Collaboration between students is encouraged, and the role of the teacher becomes more similar to that of a mentor, who is consulted upon need, but who is not (all the time) in control of the process. Although creativity might not be an explicit goal here, it can be argued that the engagement in longer-term challenging experiences has the potential to present students with problems the solution of which requires creative thinking. Therefore, both intelligence and creativity are developed in this quadrant. The final pedagogical quadrant, identified as LS-LT, entails both Loose Space and Loose Time, corresponding to a rather unconventional spatiotemporal teaching-learning device, more flexible or even breaking with the Traditional Education System (TES). This device is much more open and dynamic, it corresponds to the invention and experimentation of “radically” new school forms, in the sense that the organization of teaching activities and the students’ learning paths are guided by inter-

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and transdisciplinary project logics or even anti-, a-disciplinary, postdisciplinary or undisciplined (Darbellay, 2015, 2019), in the sense that they focus on the rhythm, the centers of interest of the children and the relation to the natural, social and economic environment and not on the sole mastery of fundamental disciplinary knowledge. The development of creativity, as well as other transversal skills (critical thinking, communication, empathy, tolerance etc.) is dominant and prevails over the out-of-context development of crystallized intelligence. The motivation and the capacity of the pupils, the division of space and time, the standards, the values and the behaviors expected of the actors of the education system, the didactics and the pedagogies, the evaluations, are in this quadrant oriented toward a non-disciplinary, transgressive, transformative, participatory and co-productive logic, which starts from the actors concerned (children, teachers, school administrators, parents, etc.) in a bottom-up movement. This type of very creative, innovative, and disruptive school forms is inspired by the new education movement with its historical figures such as Montessori, Freinet, Steiner-Waldorf, or even Decroly (Wagnon, 2019), being especially explored within alternative educational movements more radically removed from the traditional school form. We can mention, for example, the movement of Democratic schools, Forest Schools, Home Schooling, Unschooling, Slow Education, or even Positive education. We can hypothesize that the Montessori, Freinet, Steiner-Waldorf, or even Decroly schools in their past and current forms (these serve as inspiring examples for many alternative schools) could be mapped over several quadrants in the space-time continuum, crossing LS-TT, TS-LT, and LS-LT. These school forms certainly ensure learning disciplinary knowledge but articulate and go beyond them in variable combinations of spatial and temporal dimensions (in a logic of more or less and not of all or nothing). Inter- and transdisciplinary work mobilizes disciplinary skills while redefining and transforming them in an ongoing dialog in favor of the development of creative intelligence or intelligent creativity in children and teachers.

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Conclusion: Balancing Pedagogies in the Space–Time Continuum Beyond the understanding of different educational and pedagogical approaches under a new theoretical framework, the space-time continuum can also be used in a design process. Mor and Craft (2012) define Learning Design as “the creative and deliberate act of devising new practices, activity plans, resources and devices aimed at achieving particular educational purposes in a given context” (p. 86). It is no longer the programming of TES in the seventies and eighties of the last century, for which in a prescriptive way, starting from the objectives, practices were decided and mandatory paths for teaching were traced. In this sense, it is useful to distinguish, for the different theoretical background: Learning Design, which refers to constructivist theories (Maina et al., 2015), Instructional Design, which derives from a behaviorist perspective, and Design for Learning that is consistent with an enactive approach. In fact, design for learning is intended as the creation of a space-time continuum within which students are motivated and find a favorable situation for learning. For Laurillard, Design for Learning derives from an approach in which the role of the teacher is not to transmit knowledge to a passive receiver, but to decide how to involve the student, favoring high-level cognitive skills that allow the student to appropriate knowledge (Laurillard, 2013). Now, given our initial aim for the development of both intelligence and creativity, the question is whether an educational system can be designed to obtain optimal results for both of these fundamental psychological constructs, and if the space-time continuum can be used for this purpose. In our opinion, the answer is positive. It can be argued that any educational model that can be mapped onto a single quadrant of the space-time continuum has both positive aspects and limitations. In other words, transforming a traditional educational system by moving it from the TS-TT quadrant to the LS-TT, TS-LT, or LS-LT quadrant would not only be traumatic, but it would also entail both advantages and disadvantages, from many points of view. Therefore, the new concept we would like to introduce is that of balancing the design of new educational systems over the four quadrants of the space-time continuum. Only in

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this way a system could provide the wealth of experiences and methodologies that would optimize the development of both intelligence and creativity. Of course, the concept of balancing over the space-time continuum can find an indefinite number of different realizations. In terms of the relative weight of the four quadrants in the design and operalization of the system, one could, for example, hypothesize a uniform distribution of 25% in each quadrant. But this is not necessarily the optimum we are seeking: depending on the vocation, the sociocultural traditions, the level of the school/university, and also on political factors, the optimal balance could dynamically change. These exercises for design and analysis of educational systems over the space-time continuum are a clear avenue for future work.

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5 Cultivating Creativity in Computing Education: A Missed Opportunity? Michael Mose Biskjaer , Ole Sejer Iversen , and Christian Dindler

Introduction As a means to strengthen children’s understanding of computing and the complex role of digital tools and technologies in everyday life, the subject “Computing Education” (Denning & Tedre, 2019; Guzdial, 2015; M. M. Biskjaer (B) Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Center for Digital Creativity, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] O. S. Iversen · C. Dindler Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Center for Computational Thinking and Design, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] C. Dindler e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_5

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Li et al., 2020) is currently being integrated into 1st–9th grade education in several countries across the globe, among them the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia, Norway, and Denmark, to name but a few. The overarching aim of these progressive educational initiatives is not to make children better programmers, so to speak, but to equip them with the knowledge, skills, and competences necessary to thrive and take part in an increasingly digitized world. This ambition reflects that leveraging children’s creativity has become a critical learning outcome. On a societal level, focusing on creativity in computing education can be seen as a response to a call for specialized human skills– –so-called twenty-first century skills (Trilling & Fadel, 2009)––that are expected to be in high demand in the years to come. According to the most recent Future of Jobs Report (2020, p. 36), published by the World Economic Forum, creativity is prominently featured (alongside originality and initiative) at place number five on the list of the 15 most critical human skills for 2025 that each country’s educational system should prioritize. However, since it is generally accepted that creativity is intricate and difficult to clearly define and delimit (Runco, 2014; Sawyer, 2012), the conceptualization and operationalization of this term in order to make it an attainable learning goal in computing education is no easy task. At the time of writing, Denmark is testing its own variant of these computing education initiatives, namely the subject “Technology Comprehension,” which is intended to become a national subject throughout public 1st–9th grade education after thorough ministerial evaluation of the insights currently being harvested through application in-situ at several Danish schools. This initiative is seen as a major educational effort, as Technology Comprehension is expected to become the first new compulsory subject in Denmark since 1993. With creativity as a key learning objective in contemporary computing education, Technology Comprehension offers a unique opportunity for introducing creativity to a new generation of six to 16-year-old children, thereby effectively putting creativity on the school schedule in a novel and distinctly forward-looking manner. In this book chapter, we offer a detailed overview of how creativity is now being integrated into Technology Comprehension as a coming

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new compulsory subject across Danish 1st–9th grade education. Using thematic analysis, we expose several inconsistencies and contradictions in the ways in which creativity is being construed and advanced as a key learning objective in Technology Comprehension. Based on the insights from this Danish case, we ask the inconvenient, but inevitable question if the attempt to cultivate children’s creativity through computing education is a missed opportunity for future-proofing 1st–9th grade education for the twenty-first century and, in turn, for making a positive societal impact on how the next generation of world citizens approach the current challenges of the world, e.g., the United Nations’ (2018) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This book chapter should thus be seen as a call for action among creativity researchers, education researchers, learning specialists, and education policymakers to collectively embrace and engage with not simply the evident potential, but also the considerable challenge of positioning creativity as a key learning objective in state-of-the-art computing education.

Background The Subject “Technology Comprehension” in Denmark In recent years, educational sectors across the world have begun to address the challenge of digital transformation in educational programs. These various initiatives reflect different approaches to computing in education, and how computing is integrated into each country’s existing educational traditions (Vegas & Fowler, 2020). Among the most prominent examples are the K-12 Computer Science Framework (2016) in the United States, Computing at School (2008) in the United Kingdom, CoolThink@JC in Hong Kong (2016), and Digital Technologies (2014) introduced as a national curriculum in Australia. In Denmark, the initial effort to develop 1st–9th grade educational content around computing was commissioned by the Danish Ministry of Education in 2018. The ministerial mandate specifically addressed computing education in 1st–9th grade education as a response to

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digitization and the need to equip future citizens with new skills, knowledge, and competences for an increasingly digitized society. A group of 30 researchers, practitioners, and education specialists was tasked with developing a curriculum for a national compulsory subject based on this political mandate. The result was the subject “Technology Comprehension,” which, at the time of writing, is running on a trial basis on 46 public schools across Denmark. The subject is tested in two different implementation models: as an independent course (just as English or Math) in 23 schools, and as an integrated part of the existing portfolio of courses in the other 23 schools. Furthermore, 150 additional public schools have voluntarily implemented the Technology Comprehension subject, but results from these schools are not part of the official research program. These in-situ tests have run since 2019 and will finish in 2021, when the Danish government will decide how to implement Technology Comprehension as a compulsory subject (or possibly as a standalone course) in the approximately 1,500 public schools in Denmark. The Technology Comprehension subject is described in detail in a curriculum published by the Danish Ministry of Education. The Technology Comprehension Curriculum (2018) is a document that outlines the chief purpose and learning objectives of Technology Comprehension, as well as the subject’s progression from 1st to 9th grade. While this educational initiative has much in common with those found in other countries around the world (see above), the Danish initiative reflects a distinctly Scandinavian approach to primary education, where coursespecific teaching is always balanced with a concern for personal and democratic “Bildung” in order to cultivate children to become independent and engaged citizens (Dindler et al., 2020). In Technology Comprehension, this long-lived Scandinavian approach to primary education is manifested in four central areas of knowledge and competences that unite technical skills related to computational thinking, familiarity with design processes, and critical reflection on the role of technology in society. These four areas are: Digital Empowerment : The critical and constructive exploration and analysis of how technology is imbued with values and intentions, and how it shapes our lives.

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Digital Design and Design Processes: The ability to frame problems within a complex problem area and, through iterative processes, generate new ideas that can be transformed into form and content in interactive prototypes. Computational Thinking : The ability to translate a complex problem into a possible digital solution, and the abstraction of phenomena and relationships in the world and the computer’s ability to process this information. Technological Knowledge and Skills: The ability to understand and use digital technology as a material for developing digital artifacts (Smith et al., 2020, p. 150). These four areas of knowledge and competence are described in the curriculum as fundamentally entwined and mutually dependent. Together, they serve to encapsulate the Danish approach to educating children in technology, and how computing and its consequences shape our lives both individually and collectively. Although the Technology Comprehension curriculum by definition revolves around technology and computing, creativity is a central part of both the learning objectives and the above four areas of knowledge and competences. Furthermore, the mandate issued by the Ministry of Education explicitly states that Technology Comprehension, as a subject, should be creative, and that this aim must be reflected in the subject content. It is therefore presupposed in the Technology Comprehension curriculum that the children should learn to be creative.

Creativity in Education Over the years, the conceptual complexity of creativity has inspired several proposed definitions. This semantic intricacy means that even among creative practitioners (Glück et al., 2002) and educators (Jones et al., 2014), defining creativity consensually is very challenging. Even so, the creativity research community has come to agree upon what Runco and Jaeger (2012) call the “standard definition” of creativity, according to which creativity is dual, since it requires originality (novelty,

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surprise) and effectiveness (usefulness, appropriateness). Another, more elaborate definition has been offered by Plucker et al. (2004), according to whom: “Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context ” (p. 90, original emphasis). In a recent meta-study of 600 papers from several creativity-oriented disciplines, Puryear and Lamb (2020) found that the components of creativity are highly field-specific, and that the two basic criteria, novelty, and usefulness, are rarely consistently defined within a given field. This conceptual ambiguity is possibly even more pronounced in an educational context, where educators, such as teachers, work with students from 1st to 9th grade. As Beghetto (2019) points out, “creativity is a way of describing phenomena and not an entity itself ” (p. 28). This means that creativity should not be seen as a separate entity that can flourish or whither, but as an attribute, i.e., as “a distinction we bestow on particular experiences, ideas, actions, and artifacts” (p. 29). One of the critical tasks for educators working with students from 1st to 9th grade is to find fruitful ways to establish a creativity-supporting learning environment (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2010, 2014). The question, then, is on which grounds we can attribute creativity to something that students both individually and collectively foster and encounter in the classroom (Beghetto, 2019). Proposed answers to this question have changed over the past decades. Ever since Guilford’s (1950) seminal presidential address to the APA (American Psychological Association), which is often seen as the birth of modern creativity research (Sawyer, 2012, p. 16), finding efficient ways to nurture creativity among children, especially in a learning context, has interested many creativity researchers. One of the first analytical attempts to help the research community grapple with the complexity of creativity was Rhodes’ (1961) four P model, which distinguished between person (here, the student), process (the student’s cognitive mechanisms), product (the outcome), and press (the effect of the environment or social context). Recent years have seen this foundational model being either supplemented or challenged. Among the most influential contributions is Kaufman and Beghetto’s (2009) four C model, which serves to distinguish between levels of magnitude in creativity.

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The four C model operates with mini-c (here, the student having a new and meaningful idea or insight, typically in the context of learning, without anyone else sharing this experience), little-c (students sharing such experiences so that new, collective learning emerges), Pro-c (professional levels of creative accomplishment as interpreted by peers), and Big-C (eminent contributions that have stood the test of time and often transformed the way people think). Very recently, two new conceptualizations of creativity have emerged, one emphasizing the creative act itself (Walia, 2019), and one focusing on the creative experience (Gl˘aveanu & Beghetto, 2020). This book chapter is implicitly informed by the above contributions; however, rather than attempt to parcel each model and synthesize its elements, we build on another model, because it manages to bring to the fore the sociocultural complexity of creativity as it occurs in a learning context while still providing ample support for analytical distinctions. Concretely, the analysis of Technology Comprehension that we present in the following is based upon Gl˘aveanu’s (2012) five A’s framework, which distinguishes between actor (here, the student’s personal attributes), action (the student’s coordinated psychological and behavioral manifestation), artifact (the learning context of the student’s artifact production and evaluation), and, finally, audience and affordances (the interdependence between the student and the social and material learning context). In this way, the five A’s framework mirrors the learning element of mini-c in Kaufman and Beghetto’s (2009) four C model and recognizes this as valuable in itself, and it offers an applicable alternative to Rhodes’s (1961) more rigid, systemic four P model (or, more precisely, framework or conceptual overview, as it was never cast as a model). By using the five A’s as an analytical lens, this book chapter reiterates the burning title question “educating which creativity?” of Gl˘aveanu (2018), only in the particular case of cultivating creativity in computing education for 1st–9th grade students in Denmark.

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Method The study we present is based on the official Technology Comprehension curriculum (2018) as published by the Danish Ministry of Education. The purpose of our study was to understand how and to what extent creativity is addressed in the curriculum in order to answer the big question of what students are supposed to learn in terms of creativity. The study therefore focuses on the educational framework for the learning activities of Technology Comprehension as a subject. Although much material has been produced in the form of notes, memoranda, working documents, and other types of resources pertaining to teaching and practice in Technology Comprehension in Denmark, we have chosen to confine our study to the official ministerial description of the subject. The reason for this is that this specific document provides the official and legal basis for teaching Technology Comprehension as mandated by the Danish Ministry of Education. Being a legally binding document, the curriculum was initially based on a mandate developed and approved by the Minister of Education, so the curriculum offers unique insights into how Danish top politicians interpret creativity strategically in the context of the subject of Technology Comprehension. Concretely, the curriculum document was formulated by a consortium of 25 experts with representatives from the Danish Union of Teachers, the Ministry of Education, and researchers from Computer Science and the Humanities, among whom were two of the authors of this book chapter. Given the impactful nature of the curriculum as a governmental document, we chose a standard qualitative research approach (Huberman & Miles, 2002) of close, interpretative text inspection (Denzin, 2002) based on a search strategy focusing on creativity. Each researcher first read the 52-page Technology Comprehension curriculum after which the keyword search strategy was carried out. Since the curriculum is written in Danish, we opted for the search query “kreat*” [English: creat*] in Danish to target the semantic root of creativity and its relevant morphological derivations. In accordance with our intentionally delimited focus on creativity in the curriculum, we discarded various semantically comparable Danish terms, whose English equivalent would be “invent/invention, innovate/innovation, original, construct, etc.” This

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search strategy yielded 16 hits. Each hit was subjected to interpretative analysis by each researcher in order to capture the relevant semantic context in the curriculum. A shared document was made to capture this data collection. All three authors took part in the interpretation and semantic discussion of each of the 16 hits, which were then related to the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012) in order to probe affinity with one or more of the framework’s key concepts. These results were noted in another shared table document. All citations were captured in Danish (as the original language of the curriculum) and carefully translated to English to ensure maximum fidelity. By iteratively relying upon these data documents of (a) search hits, (b) semantic context, and (c) interpretation using the five A’s framework, in addition to the curriculum itself, all three authors then proceeded to collectively carry out a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) in order to distill salient themes, including inner contradictions and inconsistencies in the ways creativity is represented and interpreted in the official Danish Technology Comprehension curriculum.

Analysis Using thematic analysis, five interconnected themes emerged that are all relevant for understanding creativity in this Danish computing education initiative. Here, we present the themes and exemplify how creativity is articulated in the Technology Comprehension curriculum according to the themes. For the sake of reader-friendliness, we include only the English translations of the Danish text passages in the curriculum.

Creativity in Students’ Cognitive Skills, the Design Process, and in the New Digital Solution Our analysis reveals that the Technology Comprehension curriculum contains references to different understandings of what creativity pertains to. In some instances, creativity is linked to the students’ cognitive skills. This interpretation of creativity is exposed in the introduction to the

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new curriculum: “[The course will provide] the opportunity and basis for independently creating new digital artifacts and taking a stand on digital technologies in order to participate and act creatively in a digitized world” (p. 6). Here, the student must develop individual creative capabilities, or attributes (cf. actor in the five A’s framework, Gl˘aveanu, 2012), in order to actively engage in a wider societal context. Creativity is also used as a qualifier for the digital design process. In the description of the third competence area, Digital Design and Design Processes (see above), the curriculum states that “Digital design and design processes focus on the creative processes through which digital artifacts emerge, including the choices and opt-outs that the designer has had to make in the process” (p. 11). In this interpretation, creativity is used to describe the process in which the student takes action by engaging in complex problem solving and in tinkering with technology to design a digital artifact. Finally, creativity is linked to the digital solution to an emerging societal problem. This is articulated in the description of the competences obtained during a design process: “this can happen, for example, when students translate their studies of a complex problem field (in the outside world) into new (creative) solution proposals” (p. 51). Here, creativity is not only intrinsic to the process (cf. action) itself, but definitionally embedded in the outcome (cf. artifact ) of the design process. As this first theme shows, the Technology Comprehension curriculum conceptualizes creativity in (at least) three different ways simultaneously based on the five A’s framework, namely as actor, action, and artifact.

Creativity as a Prerequisite for Learning and as a Learning Outcome in Itself Creativity is not only used as a qualifier for Technology Comprehension as a new subject in computing education. In the Danish curriculum, creativity is also explicitly mentioned in the description of the learning aspects of this new subject. Here, creativity is primarily used as a Technology Comprehension learning outcome. This is most evident in the description of the overarching learning objectives of the subject: “Technology Comprehension contains creative learning processes” (p. 6).

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However, the same sentence provides another perspective on creativity. In this latter understanding, creativity is linked to the means by which the student attains the learning outcome. In full, the sentence reads: “Technology Comprehension contains creative learning processes, where students through the development of competences, skills, and knowledge have the opportunity to critically, creatively, and curiously create digital artifacts” (ibid., emphasis added). This means that creativity takes on an even more complex role with regard to the artifact perspective of sociocultural production and evaluation as featured in the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012). In the Technology Comprehension curriculum, creativity is both a learning outcome in itself and the means, or prerequisite, by which the student reaches their learning goal. In an artifact perspective, this double-bind conceptualization of creativity reads as a circular argument that would resemble a colloquial adage such as “you have to have money to make money.”

Creativity as a Monodisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Endeavor The Technology Comprehension curriculum is explicitly described as an interdisciplinary endeavor with learning components from the Humanities, Computer Science, and creativity research in general. Interestingly, creativity is in this interpretation positioned as an independent academic discipline just as Computer Science and the Arts. The reason for this might be that the Danish public-school system typically denotes (compulsory) subjects such as Music, Drama, Craft, and Physical Education as “creative” subjects, so that these can be distinguished from more traditional ‘bookish’ academic subjects such as Science, Languages, and Math. Even so, in the curriculum, creativity is explicitly mentioned as monodisciplinary alongside Computer Science and the Arts. In the further description of the Technology Comprehension subject, this understanding of creativity drifts into a slightly different understanding of the subject as a versatile competence embedded in other subjects. This conceptual inconsistency is most evident in the description of the four competence areas (see above) where creativity is positioned as integral:

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“These four competence areas contain both creative and constructive aspects as well as critical and reflective aspects, just as the subject [Technology Comprehension] combines formation-oriented [i.e., Bildungoriented, see above] and academic components that are integrated in all aspects of the subject” (p. 9). This conflation of creativity as both mono- and interdisciplinary endeavor is amplified in the curriculum’s final remarks, which state that “The subject of Technology Comprehension is on the one hand a critical, analytical subject, and on the other hand a creative crafts subject” (p. 50). Seen through the lens of the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012), this inconsistency in the disciplinary nature of creativity in Technology Comprehension pertains to the understanding of the artifact, i.e., the sociocultural (learning) context of the production and evaluation of creativity in the classroom, and to the audience of the interpretation of creativity in the curriculum, i.e., the active learning process with “multiple others assisting, contributing, judging, criticizing, or using the creative act and/or resulting artifact(s)” (p. 6).

Creativity as an Individual and Collective Phenomenon The thematic analysis of the Technology Comprehension curriculum reveals no conclusive arguments for determining if creativity is envisioned as a purely individual or a collective phenomenon in this specific learning context. In fact, several understandings of creativity as an individual and a collaborative phenomenon coexist in the curriculum. In the description of the learning objectives of the Technology Comprehension subject, creativity is emphatically tied to both individual and collective learning processes: “Technology Comprehension unites humanistic, creative, and Computer Science disciplines in the effort to educate students to be able to investigate and understand people’s use of digital technology, and prerequisites for independently and in collaboration with others to redesign or develop new digital artifacts” (2018, p. 6). However, when analyzing students’ progression from primary to lower secondary school, the curriculum states that creativity should be mastered independently by the student: “Progression within lower

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secondary school points toward making each student independent in the creative design process” (p. 21). Here, assessment of student competences is tied to the ability to independently take on responsibility and engagement in the creative design process. When seen through the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012), this emphasizes not merely a conceptual (or didactic) inconsistency, but also the interwovenness of actor (here, the individual student’s attribute of independence), action (what the student demonstrates in the learning context), the audience with whom the student engages (the other students and the educator(s) in the learning situation) in their attempt to come up with an artifact (the cultural context of the learning situation) that is ultimately deemed creative.

Creativity as an Unleashed Potential in Technology and as a Design Solution The Technology Comprehension curriculum clearly distinguishes between the notion of digital technology and digital artifact although the two are by definition entwined, as one cannot imagine a digital artifact that in its realization does not rely on some kind of digital technology. This semantic distinction, however, is particularly important when interpreting and analyzing creativity in a learning context with regard to an unleashed potential in a given digital technology (i.e., material) or in a digital artifact (i.e., an outcome of a design process). To elucidate this complexity, the two notions, digital technology and digital artifact, have been defined by two of this chapter’s authors in a separate Technology Comprehension Glossary (2019). In this, the term “digital technology” is defined as “a material that has an essential digital element. Unlike digital artifact, digital technology denotes the potential that the digital material holds in relation to being able to be part of a design process, where digital technology is used to design a digital artifact. A programming language, a database, an Arduino board, or a Makey-Makey are typical examples of digital technologies” (n.p.). Conversely, digital artifact differs from digital technology by being defined as “a man-made object that contains

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an essential element of digital technology. Unlike the term “digital technology,” the term “digital artifact” stresses the product qualities that have been created through design and programming, whereby intentionality and purpose have been embedded in the artifact” (n.p.). In relation to digital technology, creativity is drawn up as a way of expressing oneself and thereby unleashing the potential of opportunities “hidden” in the digital technology (i.e., the material). This is evident in the description of how students enrolled in the Technology Comprehension course should be taught to express themselves by disclosing the opportunities in digital technology by trial-and-error experiments and through action-oriented teaching and learning: “the [classroom learning] activities are by nature action-oriented, and they contribute to a technological understanding of the world around us, which is absolutely crucial in terms of enabling the student to express themselves independently and creatively about and with digital technology” (2018, p. 51). Creativity in relation to digital technology in the Technology Comprehension subject can therefore be interpreted as a combination of action (the student’s perceivable display of effort in classroom learning activities) and affordances (unleashing a creative concept or an idea by given it a material form) as featured in the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012). As for understanding creativity in relation to digital artifacts, creativity is articulated quite differently in the Technology Comprehension curriculum (2018). Here, creativity is seen as pertaining to the procedure, where the digital design process is carried out, or to the potential impact that a digital artifact can (and, ideally, should) have on society. Consequently, creativity specifically in relation to digital artifacts bears some resemblance to a Schönian reflection-in-action learning process (Schön, 1983) in which the student has made (informed) choices and deselected product features during the unfolding of the design activities: “Digital design and design processes [in Technology Comprehension] focus on the creative processes through which digital artifacts are generated, including the choices and opt-outs that the designer [the student] has had to make in the process” (Technology Comprehension Curriculum, 2018, p. 11). Contrary to the curriculum’s treatment of digital technology, its interpretation of digital artifacts emphasizes the actor (the student’s less obvious personal attributes such as individual

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reflection) and, unsurprisingly, the artifact (the design process as the sociocultural context of the artifact’s emergence through a given classroom activity) as key perspectives in the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012). However, the role of digital artifacts in the Technology Comprehension curriculum also embraces an audience perspective by stressing the interdependence between the creator (the student) and the need for the student to (ideally) aim for a societal (i.e., ‘real-world’) impact with their design artifact. As the outcome of the design process, this materialization of the student’s thoroughly contemplated idea points to the need to also take affordances into account, as the design artifact, which others should be able to interact and/or engage with, ultimately has digital technology as its ontological basis.

Discussion As the thematic analysis has revealed through the application of the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012), the role of creativity in the Technology Comprehension subject is exactly as multifarious as one would expect given the conceptual complexity of the term itself (Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Our intention with the analysis has not been to pick apart the curriculum. On the contrary, our aim is to bring to the fore some of the complications embedded in this curriculum as an example of how difficult it is to implement creativity as an integral part of computing education in order to attain a positive societal impact by equipping children with the knowledge, skills, and competences they need to cope with the challenges of the twenty-first century. Here, we sum up the results of the analysis in the form of two key insights that evoke three pressing questions, which we argue merit more reflection and discussion among creativity researchers, education researchers, learning specialists, and education policymakers.

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Creativity Is Integral to the Danish Technology Comprehension Subject The analysis showed that all five components of the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012) could be identified in the Technology Comprehension curriculum (2018) and that the 16 occurrences of creativity in the document could be condensed into five main themes. When examining these five themes, it becomes evident that they cover multiple aspects of creativity. The first theme shows how creativity in Technology Comprehension is closely linked to the active ingredients, so to speak, of the learning situation in the classroom––the student’s emerging skills and competences in this specific subject, their engagement in the design process itself, and the design solution as the epitome of their efforts. The next two themes adopt a slightly different perspective by considering the relevance of creativity in the learning process; first, by assigning creativity a conditional role therein, and second, by establishing creativity on a higher-order disciplinary level in terms of the relevance of creativity both within and across course-specific learning (Rowlands, 2011). The fourth theme introduces the further relevance of creativity in the setting of collaborative learning (Dillenbourg, 1999), while the fifth theme illustrates the relevance of creativity in the interdependence between technological potentiality and idea materialization in the design outcome, thereby echoing what Robles and Wiberg (2010) have called “the material turn” in interaction design, which calls for a new vocabulary to articulate the complex relations between physical and digital materials. As these five themes illustrate, the Technology Comprehension subject manages to tap into several ongoing discussions about creativity; not least what it means to learn to be creative, and how it might best be taught in the classroom through progressive learning activities. In our view, the main challenge in the curriculum is that this very inclusive understanding of creativity might not be fully intentional, but rather coincidental, as creativity seems to have been woven into the fabric of the subject as an a priori positive qualifier. Although creativity has not always been seen as exclusively positive (Nelson, 2010), it now seems near impossible to conceive of creativity as undesirable in a learning context. Would any educator claim that they would not want their students

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to become creative? The challenge remains that cultivating creativity in the classroom through learning activities, not least in computing education, whose subject matter is critical and constructive engagement with state-of-the-art digital technologies, calls for more creativity-relevant knowledge, especially among educators. As Boden (2001) points out, “Creativity is not the same thing as knowledge, but is firmly grounded in it. What educators must try to do is to nurture the knowledge without killing the creativity” (p. 102). The question, then, is how to instill such knowledge about creativity among both students and educators. A promising path has been suggested by Rowlands (2011), namely that this endeavor “implies the need for students to engage in meta-discourse, involving the nature and history of the subject-matter taught” (p. 47). Students therefore need didactic support in order to thoroughly engage with creativity in (at least some of ) its conceptual complexity as a fundamental part of our life and learning as human beings. In our view, the emergence of computing education initiatives across the globe, among them the Technology Comprehension subject in Denmark, presents a unique window of opportunity to not only articulate the importance of creativity in learning and education, but, more critically, to find efficient, didactic ways and means to realize this tremendous potential.

Articulations of Creativity in the Technology Comprehension Subject Appear Contradictory and Inconsistent While the first insight focuses on the prevalence of creativity in Technology Comprehension, this second insight concerns the lack of alignment across the curriculum with regard to this specific conceptualization. As indicated in the Background section, many different interpretations of creativity exist, and there is no “golden standard” in the sense of the right taxonomy. As Gardner (1988) put it more than three decades ago, creativity is “precisely the kind of problem which eludes explanation within one discipline” (p. 22). Although we appreciate the importance of maintaining a wide-embracing interpretation of creativity, such an approach entails the significant risk of not being able to operationalize

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creativity as a concrete learning objective in computing education. As the analysis has shown, creativity in the Technology Comprehension curriculum is not only linked to all of the A’s in the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012), but also pertains to several levels of abstraction. To sum up, the Technology Comprehension curriculum simultaneously focuses on creativity as critical to • • • • • • •

the individual student their peers the design process the learning process the design outcome the didactic basis for learning the learning objective. In addition, creativity is concurrently construed as

• • • •

monodisciplinary interdisciplinary technological potential materialized expression.

As Beghetto (2019) rightly puts it (see above), creativity is not an entity in itself, but a descriptor we can reach for in order to attribute value and meaning to a given phenomenon. This conception is certainly plausible and valuable on a theoretical level. However, for a teacher standing in a classroom with 25 or more 4th grade students eager to learn about digital tools and technologies, this lack of conceptual and subjectmatter alignment in Technology Comprehension makes it a daunting task to ensure that creativity is sufficiently achieved as a learning objective in every understanding of the term as it is now formulated in the curriculum. One example of this is the circular argument (see the second theme above) according to which students are expected to demonstrate creativity as a prerequisite for their own learning; yet that self-same creativity is presented as a key learning objective in itself that emerges from the classroom learning activities. Similarly, as illustrated by the

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third theme above, it seems challenging to try to implement creativity as an independent academic discipline alongside Computer Science and the Arts, and at the same time operationalize it as a versatile competence embedded in other subjects as indicated by the said four competence areas. When considering creativity in computing education in a larger perspective, the problem with such contradictions and inconsistencies is not just one of practical concern in the context of learning, but also one pertaining to the value we ascribe to creativity. In our view, creativity risks being devaluated when it is spread out too thinly, so to speak, without proper terminological qualification. When the various aspects of creativity are not adequately specified, contextualized, and prioritized, especially in a learning context, the promotion of creativity can easily backfire, because the lack of attention to the complexity of the concept undermines its relevance. We speculate that one promising way to address this inexpedience might be to incorporate more theoretical contributions from the creativity literature into the teaching of Technology Comprehension. All disciplines have their canonical texts; however, a syllabus-focused approach might not be the most efficient way to proceed. Rather, we believe that some of the models already introduced in this chapter––notably, the seminal four P model (Rhodes, 1961), the four C model (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009), and, as we have deployed here, the five A’s framework (Gl˘aveanu, 2012)––continue to hold great promise; first, as a theoretical underpinning of the further development of Technology Comprehension as a subject (and potential standalone course), and second, as conversational, analytical, and didactic tools that educators can introduce in their teaching activities as means to unpack the complexity of creativity with regard to the digital tools and technologies that inevitably contribute to shape our future, which is what Technology Comprehension and other similar initiatives in computing education are meant to prepare the next generation of students for. A beacon in such an increased awareness of the complexity of creativity in computing education could be how to teach students “when their creativity will have the most value” (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014, p. 66), and that such creativity thrives under constraints, uncertainty, and ambiguity (Beghetto, 2019; Dove et al., 2017). Embracing such an approach

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in order to cultivate creativity in the classroom in computing education would require that “teachers develop a working understanding of the creativity studies literature and spend time monitoring how students are experiencing their classroom learning environment […] This includes encouraging students to share their creativity, providing supportive feedback to students when they do, and modeling creativity for students during the everyday act of teaching” (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2014, p. 66). Finally, we support the idea of looking toward other disciplines, notably Design, to discern valuable resources that can help to identify and cultivate creativity in the classroom (Calavia et al., 2021). This strategy does not exclusively apply to Technology Comprehension, but should be adopted across subjects, because, as Henriksen et al. (2021) point out, “there is a lack of common ground within and between disciplines and research about how creativity relates to technology in teaching and learning—especially in the uncertain space of classroom implementation” (p. 1).

Closing Remarks The auspicious perspective of successful “classroom implementation” (op. cit.) will not have much effect on the reality of teaching, unless the collective of creativity researchers, education researchers, learning specialists, and education policymakers come together to ask the inconvenient, but inevitable question of which creativity we wish to educate (Gl˘aveanu, 2018) in computing education if children should learn to be (more) creative. If we as an interdisciplinary community are to fulfill the promise of educating students to become informed and engaged participants in the increasingly digitized twenty-first century and equip them with the knowledge, skills, and competences they need to accomplish this, we must ask ourselves three crucial questions that we pose below. In this book chapter, we have focused on Technology Comprehension as a Danish example of a progressive initiative in computing education. Based on our familiarity with many similar educational initiatives (see above), we argue that these three questions are relevant across the entire global array of ongoing initiatives in computing education.

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If cultivating creativity in computing education should not become a spectacular missed opportunity to prepare the next generation of students for the challenges of the twenty-first century, these are what we consider the three crucial questions, exemplified by Technology Comprehension that we as a collective must attempt to answer: • How can Technology Comprehension serve as an opportunity to put creativity on the school schedule through progressive and exciting learning activities? • How can the five A’s framework and similar models with great explanatory power best enhance the students’ learning through the informed implementation of creativity in computing education? • How can creativity research help to establish a rich knowledge base for the global initiatives in computing education that are currently being implemented in 1st–9th grade education?

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Villum Foundation (grant no. 28831), the Velux Foundations grant “Digital Tools in Collaborative Creativity” (grant no. 00013140), and the Aarhus University Research Foundation grant “Creative Tools.”

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6 Multiple Creativities Put to Work for Creative Ecologies in Teacher Professional Learning: A Vision and Practice of Everyday Creativity Tamás Péter Szabó , Pamela Burnard , Anne Harris , Kristóf Fenyvesi , Gomathy Soundararaj , and Tea Kangasvieri

Introduction It is no surprise why creativities research (which sees all creativity as inherently multiple and diverse) attests to the disruption of dominant framings of learning and teaching over the last twenty years. In light of the radical shifts that the twenty-first century anthropocene are producing in terms of what it means to be human (and more The original version of this chapter was previously published non-open access. A Correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_13

T. P. Szabó (B) · T. Kangasvieri Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] T. Kangasvieri e-mail: [email protected] P. Burnard University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2022 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_6

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than human), the imperative for locating, differentiating and theorizing multiple creativities, generated by expanding domain-specific and domain-general approaches, involves forms of authorship (i.e., who and how creates) which are essential to education (Burnard & Colucci-Gray, 2020), including teacher education. The understanding and operationalization of seeing and doing things differently by deviating from established pathways are, as argued by Harwood et al. (2017), to confront head-on “the hegemony of developmental and neoliberalized conceptions of subject learning” (p. 176). In this chapter, we argue for a new vision for developing participatory practice possibilities for teacher professional learning that features the research-based development of diverse creativities as practice to catalyze environmental change in the school context. Diverse and differentiated creativities urge us to rethink and revision the way we author new knowledge, new learning, and new ways of teaching in a world of fast-changing educational landscapes. Teachers find teaching for creativity and teaching creatively (Burnard & White, 2008; Chappell, 2018; Cremin & Chappell, 2019; Jeffrey & Craft, 2004)—along with documenting creative pedagogies in the years of formal schooling—a challenge. In addition to this, there is an impact on student creativity demanded by standardization and riskaverse approaches. Yet there are still teachers and researchers who have found a way to ignite, enliven, and foster wonderment in their classrooms by making the conditions for creativity through attention to the A. Harris RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Fenyvesi Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] G. Soundararaj New Nordic School, Espoo, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

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whole school, or a creative ecologies approach (Harris, 2016, 2017), possible. We argue that acknowledging diverse creativities across an integrated creative ecology is effective in projects like the one presented here that involves several stakeholders with diverse backgrounds, expertise, aims, and organizational cultures. In the following sections, we discuss how such innovative creative approaches to teacher education can provide crucial resources and support for creative teaching. Drawing on sociologist Richard Sennett’s study of the work of craftspeople, catalyzing educational change involves the ability to do differently and to see forward, “always being one step ahead of the material” (Sennett, 2008, p. 175), rather than a preconceived finished product. To creatively anticipate is not simply a matter of predicting change in teacher education, but “of opening up a path and improvising a passage” (Ingold, 2013, p. 68). In seeking to craft this creative new educational landscape, we ask: 1. What kinds of new tools are being developed for innovating teacher education and creating new and diverse pedagogical strategies in a multi-stakeholder environment? 2. In what way can this “ecological” dialog across organizational cultures be facilitated? We address these questions through an illustrative case of an international in-service teacher education program, “Everyday Creativity” (Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019), which was developed in the frame of an international project with seven partners representing primary, secondary, and tertiary education institutions, local businesses and civic organizations. Beyond their different professional backgrounds, the partners came from different countries (Romania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy and Finland) which added further layers of complexity in terms of local traditions, working cultures, and social discourses of education. The understanding of such a complex environment for collaborative curriculum development and implementation requires an ecological theory which takes a diversity of creativities into account. After presenting this conceptual framework, we discuss the Everyday Creativity

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project from the point of view of course developers and course participants. The case study leads to a discussion of lessons learnt from the process as well as recommendations for further research.

Framing and Operationalizing Creativities Theory-Into-Practice An Ecological Framework for Diverse Creativities An increasing emphasis on creativity in the teaching of subjects and for teaching creatively, particularly in sciences, as well as arts, indicates the ongoing importance and need to prioritize meaningful embodied learning with material enactments of learning that creativity, no matter how hard to define, or which creativity we are educating for, can be learned and taught. Diversifying and pluralizing creativities displaces the whole panoply of what we see in real-world practices of materially diverse co-authoring rather than an individualized cognitive act. Fostering multiple creativities plays a crucial role in future-making education. This comes in realizing transformational change from co-authorship which is redefining what pupils, families, and our communities need from our schools; what educators need to thrive in the profession; and what our pupils need to flourish in their lives. Thus, thinking through the ways in which educating for diverse creativities is a bold new agenda in this pandemic and digital era. The idea of “multiple creativities” is not new. Howard Gardner (1983) has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences which has been applied to creativities which can be bounded by subject disciplines but also does different work and engenders different practices in and across the interrelationships between sciences and the arts. For example, where creatives often relied on different intelligences to manifest their creativity, where, for example, Jane Austen, Virgina Woolf, Maya Angelou, and T. S. Eliot made their reputation through linguistic intelligence; they also opened new ways that intersected with literary creativity. Ada Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, and Albert Einstein developed processes of reciprocal

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capture in mathematical creativity through logical-mathematical intelligence. Similarly, Hildegard von Bingen, Amy Beach, Clara Schumann, and Igor Stravinsky became famous through the entangled nature of their musical intelligence and musical creativity. Reconfiguring the concept of “creativities” as a core element of education found in the moments of always becoming creative, allows us to rethink one of the most significant concepts in society, and therefore future-making education. From this premise, the conception of a plurality of creativities (rather than the outmoded singular use of creativity) addresses a performative space (rather than a representational space) acknowledging different and diverse enactments and illustrations. These are both emerging and continuously re-made through material enactments, which are authored in material relationships that are complex, dynamic, and situated. This is authoring and performing change at strategic, policy, or system levels (how things are done at whole school levels) and how this permeates everything else at classroom practice levels. In delineating this line of argument, we see how developing and sustaining the capacity to author new practices and possibilities, for what might, to others, seem impossible or even barely possible, is to open space for performing the indefinite and uncertain. Based on the above considerations, we advance a “creative ecological” (Harris, 2016, 2017, 2018) model of creativities, in which multiple creativities productively entangle in learning communities. Refraining from advancing one generically reduced conception of creativity, such as teaching “creative thinking” (Lucas & Spencer, 2017) or the process of prescribing or naming specific conditions for embedding creativity in schools (Craft et al., 2001), we foreground creativity’s inherent nature as multiple, relational, and active. An ecological approach to diverse and multiple creativities allows for new and innovative ways of learning and teaching, while also allowing for multiplicities in other context-specific elements of the “ecology” (see Fig. 6.1). The ecological approach (Harris, 2016, 2017, 2018) to enhancing teaching and learning for multiple and differentiated creativities takes into account the entire context and community of various stakeholders engaged in creative action. The model (Fig. 6.1) includes five loci which not only interrelate but also require individual attention in order

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Fig. 6.1 Creative ecologies (Adapted from Harris, 2016, 2017)

to build an integrated creative ecology that is sustainable. Products, processes, partnerships, policies, and the physical environment are all always already in process and interacting to inform or block creative events and experiences. School contexts and practices can also be considered sites of tension between the “innovation/product” understanding of contemporary creative value, versus the “ecological/relational” approach, one of the reasons why they are such contested and important sites of creative and cultural production. Using Harris’ model, educators and scholars can address all five of the foci individually, which includes the “products” requirement of curriculum, testing, and assessment. Whether teachers’ orientations are toward the more pervasive assessment and commodification of creativity (Harris, 2014; McIntyre et al., 2016) approach (more preoccupied with outputs than processes), or a more distributed, rhizomatic approach, the creative ecologies heuristic can be applied. Recognizing that education contexts a priori provide a rich ecology of

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multiplicities entangled with, rather than acting on, human participants, allows for more sustainable and flexible alternative frameworks for reimagining and operationalizing radical change in twenty-first century professional learning communities, especially within teacher education. In other words, both individual and collaborative practices, relationships and outcomes can be enhanced simultaneously. A creative ecological approach can also address the urgent need for schools and teacher education programs to rapidly improve their approaches to preparing students for tertiary, vocational, or workplace next-steps. As transnational corporations like Lego, Google and others continue to assert, formal education is lagging behind so badly that alternatives are already springing up (by necessity), including in-house, on-the-job training, micro-credentialing, and internships alone as career pathways. Inspired by evidence-based, large-scale empirical research (e.g. Harris, 2016), we argue in this chapter that it is possible (and preferable) to expand improvements to teacher education and professional development beyond neoliberal notions of “workplace readiness” and toward an environmental, ecological, sustainable education for lives worth living. As Whitehead (1927/1929) encouraged us nearly one hundred years ago, there is no need to reduce creativities to “what humans do”, but rather allow our natural creative impulses, skills, and pleasures to return us to more holistic education approaches which can add multiple values simultaneously, through rich and embodied experiences. Our theoretical framework (see Fig. 6.2) incorporates the dual concepts of “creative ecologies” and “multiple creativities” through practice-based and reflective teacher education evident in this model of multi-stakeholder collaborative activities. Applied to the case study that follows, collaborative creativity in interprofessional learning and teaching highlight multiple ways of knowing held within a holistic creative ecology, thus shifting the focus from creative capacities or skills to growing creative communities.

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Fig. 6.2 Theoretical framework for this study with assemblage of the macromeso creative ecologies and micro pluralism of diverse creativities

“Everyday Creativity”: An International Collaborative Effort to Boost Schools’ Creative Resources with Finnish Models of Education Aiming at increasing creativity and innovation in everyday practices of schools in four European countries (Romania, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands), an international Erasmus+ KA2 strategic partnership project was carried out between December 2017 and November 2019. The project “Everyday Creativity – Boosting the internal creative resources of European schools with Finnish models of education”

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targeted in-service teachers from primary and secondary schools to involve them actively in their own and their colleagues’ professional development. With the choice of the term everyday creativity, the project team wanted to demythologize creativity as a divine concept or something belonging only to geniuses. The term itself is not new; for example, it has been used in literary studies (e.g. Swann, 2006), emphasizing the omnipresence of playful and creative ways of language use, thus deconstructing discourses that sharply separate mundane and artistic language use. In psychological studies, Richards (2007) has advanced the investigation of the “hidden potential” of everyday creativity. Building on Richards’ research, everyday (or, alternatively, “little c”) creativity has been highlighted as a factor that promotes wellbeing (Silvia et al., 2014). Expanding earlier definitions and building an ecological framework for multiple everyday creativities, the project also aimed to emphasize how creativity belongs to all and, in educational contexts, is available to and relevant for all teachers. In tight collaboration among partners, a blended course that built on the above presented ecological framework as well as the vision on creativity manifested in the Finnish National Core Curriculum (FNCC) was co-created. Methodologically, the course followed the principles of research-based teacher education with the teacher-researcher in the focus. These aspects are elaborated in the following sections.

Creative Ecological Dimensions of the Finnish National Core Curriculum (2014) As the Everyday Creativity project aimed at boosting teachers’ creative pedagogical resources with Finnish models of education, here we take a glance at the Finnish National Core Curriculum (henceforth FNCC; Finnish National Agency for Education [FNAE], 2016) to consider how its main recommendations support the ecological approach to educational creativity at the policy level. A wide and acknowledged autonomy of and societal trust in teachers as highly trained professionals (Paradis et al., 2019; Pollari et al., 2018) set the conditions

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for teachers’ experimentation, even improvisation, and continuous selfreflective professional development. These potentials are reinforced and extended by the prosocial character and collective competence-oriented aspects of the growing emphasis on shared leadership models in Finnish education (Yada, 2020). The term “ecology” explicitly appears in FNCC, mostly in the context of sustainability, which is among the central guiding themes of the curriculum. This is in line with the United Nations’ recommendations about Education for Sustainable Development (FNAE, 2016, p. 18). In addition to ecological thinking’s explicit appearance regarding sustainability, there is an implicit ecological dimension in FNCC. This tacit aspect of creative ecological thinking is reflected in FNCC’s holistic approach to the development of school culture (FNAE, 2016, pp. 28– 32.), which is in parallel with the models of creative ecologies we chose for this study (Burnard, 2012; Harris, 2016, 2017; Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). For example, emphasis on the school as a learning community, wellbeing and safety, interaction and versatile working approach, cultural diversity and language awareness, participation and democratic action, equity and equality as well as environmental responsibility and sustainable future orientation all point to the direction of less centralized leadership structures, increased wellbeing and creativity. FNCC enhances creative ecological transition and recommends several pragmatic and “everyday” ways to manage interaction and negotiations between various stakeholders of education, including pupils, teachers, special educators, caregivers, administrative staff, social workers, service providers, and labor market actors. Beyond implications and implicit cues, the development of creativity is in the forefront of FNCC in explicit terms as well. Developing creativity by various means appears in FNCC approximately 100 times in multiple configurations, contexts, and roles. For example, the cultural role and embeddedness of creativity emerge from cultural diversity as a resource (FNAE, 2016, p. 16.). Creativity also appears in a didactic function: to inspire pupils, competence development, the joy of learning emotional experiences (FNAE, 2016, p. 17) and to encourage multiple work approaches in every age group and different learners (FNAE, 2016, p. 28.). Creativity appears in organizational functions and is reflected

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in the learning environment, which has to offer possibilities for creative solutions (FNAE, 2016, p. 30). Further, creativity emerges as part of personal, individual characteristics, which education needs to develop in every pupil by developing various skills, including creative communication, like engaging in versatile ways of self-expression and constructive interaction (FNAE, 2016, p. 31.) In sum, to grasp “everyday creativity” in Finnish schools on the policy level, one can assess creativity’s role also in the didactics of the school subjects and on the level of transversal competence development. Further, FNCC presents a progressive and cumulative plan for creative development in both contexts, building a continuum across education in different age groups. That is, creative development in basic education (grades 1–9) continues the work of early childhood education (cf. the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Early Childhood Education and Care; FNAE, 2019).

Developing a Research-Based Blended Course in Multi-stakeholder Co-creation One of the main goals with the in-service teacher education course was to encourage participants to rethink and change their professional practices. In order to support teachers’ learning and innovation process, the blended course was built on the framework of teacher-researcher (Hunter & Emery, 2015; Stenhouse, 1981) who observes and reflects on their own practices. Research-based teacher education in Finland has become a mainstream approach (e.g. Szabó & Kärkkäinen, 2018; Säntti et al., 2018), meaning not only that teacher educators conduct research but also that pre-service teachers develop their skills for self-reflection (in Jyväskylä, for example, in the course “Professional development, learning guidance and explorative teacherhood,” 10 ECTS; Study Guide, 2020), and several of them write their Bachelor or Master’s thesis about the analysis of their own teaching practice. The teacher-researcher (Fin. tutkiva opettaja) framework is well known and adapted in Finnish teacher education so this was one of the main contributions of the “Finnish models of education” highlighted in the project title.

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The development of the blended course followed the principles of cocreation to which stakeholders with different backgrounds contributed at various stages. There were four organizations that were responsible for recruiting and supporting participants in the four participating countries: Spektrum Educational Center (consortium coordinator, Romania), Stichting Business Development Friesland (foundation, the Netherlands), M-Around Educational Consulting Ltd. (private business, Hungary), and Società Cooperativa Sociale Borgorete (cooperative, Italy). Two partners were responsible for intellectual outputs. The University of Jyväskylä (Finland) led the development and implementation of the blended course and learning materials (Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019), while Attila József Primary School’s (Romania) major output was the “Guidelines for teachers as accelerators of creativity and innovation in their schools and communities” (Ferencz-Salamon et al., 2019). The Guidelines were meant to support in-service teachers in getting an overview of the project and gaining tools for its dissemination (e.g. in the form of printable posters, charts, figures, etc. to be freely used in local training events). A private company, In the City Project Development (the Netherlands) was responsible for media work (design and editing) in various platforms. Although teachers from Finland were not recruited to participate in the blended course as regular participants, local collaborative partner schools of the University of Jyväkylä (Jyväskylä Christian School, University of Jyväskylä Teacher Training School and Viitaniemi School) hosted school visits and some of their teachers engaged in deep discussions with participants. According to their explicit written consent, all contributors, including participating teachers and project coordinators appear with their name in the published learning materials (Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019; Ferencz-Salamon et al., 2019) so their intellectual property and agency are made visible and acknowledged.

Course Content, Structure, and Organization The blended course design follows a modular structure for focused reflection and discussion. The course was built in consecutive phases of

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planning and implementation that has fed each other, the first being needs assessment including an online survey and a series of stakeholder interviews with school staff members in the involved countries. In particular, potential future users were invited to influence content. The curriculum of the course was proposed by Tamás Péter Szabó and Kristóf Fenyvesi based on the results of a needs analysis conducted as an online questionnaire survey with 652 respondents. The results of the survey pointed to teachers’ need to explore multi-sensory learning, use of learning spaces, ways of combining study fields, methods to involve and engage students in interaction, and the use of ICT tools (Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019, p. 22). The curriculum proposal was discussed in a project meeting in Perugia in Spring 2018. All project partners were asked to provide feedback, and they all suggested valuable sources for the modules, bearing in mind that only Open Access materials should be used to guarantee equal opportunities for learners. As a result of the needs assessment process and negotiations with partners, the following development areas were identified for the course: 1. Learning space and multi-sensory teaching, building on a posthuman approach to the body and senses as central to understanding, placing transcorporeal engagement and distributed cognition to the fore. 2. Developing applicable skills through teaching, facilitating teachers’ individual professional development through concrete methods and toolkits—encouraging them, at the same time, to adapt and develop such tools themselves. 3. Organization of interaction and technology in the school, with special regard to facilitating learners’ small group interaction, projects, and student-initiated learning activities. 4. Connecting different subjects in learning and teaching, e.g., inter, multi-, and transdisciplinary education where to artificially pull subjects apart makes a shift with its humanist focus and abstracted views of knowledge to a flattened onto-epistemology. Such an epistemology focuses on attention on the being, the entanglements of humans and materials and a pluralist knowing arising from all the senses.

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The structure of the course was as follows. In the first online phase, participants were asked to self-evaluate their own teaching and encapsulate their personal teaching philosophy. This self-reflective task was followed by another reflective task which was done in groups of teachers from the same country. This task was called “Creativity in our school” and involved good examples that participants observed in their surrounding school communities. There were several minor individual assignments, mainly reflections on sources and own teaching practices. Such assignments were linked to the five thematic modules. When finalizing the tasks, the course developers (Szabó and Fenyvesi) wanted to create opportunities and design learning pathways but avoid over-instructing participants to keep learning flexible and personalized. The online preparatory phase was followed by an on-site intensive week in Jyväskylä in November 2018. The 5-day program offered invited workshops with the contribution of academic experts, school visits, participants’ collaborative work on course modules in four-member groups in which one person represented each country, as well as participants’ presentations and joint planning sessions (Table 6.1). With this Table 6.1 The structure of the intensive training week in Jyväskylä

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solution, the aim was to create diverse learning groups in which recognizing some of the differences in participants’ background and taken-forgranted working cultures enhances the emergence of a reflective observer stance. Finally, the second online phase was dedicated to the implementation and reporting of individual follow-up projects. Teacher participants’ creativity workshops for their colleagues contributed to dissemination and at the same time transformed course content and the learning experience. The instructed blended training was finally transformed into an online self-study module which is freely available online (https://cre ativeschools.eu/en/page/138/teacher-training) in five languages (English, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Dutch). The transformation process from an instructed, closed course to open learning material brought challenges which were exciting to solve (Szabó et al., 2019). The blended course components aimed at exposing the participants to a variety of perspectives that foster creativity. The first online phase activity where the participants wrote reports on interesting features of their own teaching, enabled teachers to look at their own work from another person’s perspective which forms the basis of dialogic learning. During the intensive week, the whole course community discovered the richness of diverse pedagogical perspectives. The visit, interaction, and observation with Finnish teachers at local schools led to fruitful and thought-provoking conversations that benefitted both the Finnish teachers and the participants. The daily workshops of the intensive week facilitated engaged conversations and peer learning. When participants created a module portfolio with their diverse group composed of members from each participating country, the process, shared observations, and discussions led to moments of surprise, encounters with the unknown, and the chances to become familiar with others’ point of view. The final follow-up projects are a culmination of the experiences, exposure to diverse perspectives, and creative ideas gained from the blended course. Lessons learnt from the project were presented in a Teachers’ Handbook which, similarly to the online self-study module, was published in five languages (the English version is Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019). The handbook was built on teacher participants’ experiences to inspire

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other teachers and school communities to develop their own pedagogical practices around creativity. In addition to this, the handbook also offers insights for researchers on creative practices. After summarizing project partners’ and participants’ experiences, the handbook presents all study modules (listed above in this section) with materials and additional sources (pp. 30–62). Excerpts from teachers’ course assignments are incorporated into the text to show the diversity of participants’ approaches and voices. The handbook also includes materials of all seven workshops organized by invited experts during the on-site intensive week in Jyväskylä (pp. 63–85). Finally, the handbook makes teachers’ follow-up projects available in a structured and edited (shortened) way. Each participating teachers’ follow-up is classified according to the type of educational change it promotes and the main professional development goals formulated by its author (pp. 86– 89). Altogether 20 follow-up projects are published with illustrations and additional sources (pp. 90–128).

Approaches to an Ecology of Diverse Creativities: An Analysis of Teachers’ Accounts with the Renewal of Learning Environments in Focus In order to better understand how this project has promoted teachers’ creativities-in-practice in the context of their professional learning, we specify the overall research questions of this chapter (listed in Sect. 6.1). Studying a vision of creative ecologies emerged in the learning community of the project, in the analysis we ask how teachers reflect on diverse creativities and the environment (human and material alike) in which they developed their follow-ups. We take examples from teachers’ contributions published in the handbook (Szabó, Fenyvesi et al., 2019) which we abbreviate as “Handbook” to make referencing in this section easier. Our goal with analyzing a published material is to open dialog with researchers who can find the presented quotes in their original context and can further think about

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them. All course-related materials have been used and published in the Handbook with the participants’ written consent. We approach our data from an applied Discourse Analytic perspective, devoting special attention to narratives (e.g. Bruner, 1991; Ochs, 1997). We argue that teachers’ self-reflective course assignments as well as their reports on their experimental and exploratory follow-up projects can be considered narratives through which teachers discursively reconstruct not only their professional identities but also their visions on creativity and their perceptions of the local ecologies they practice their profession. These narratives, authored by teachers (cf. author as a narrative role; Bakhtin, 1981), invite their audience (in the project: peer teachers; in this study: researchers) to “change the story” (Haraway, 2016, p. 40) of human-nonhuman interactivity and emerging creativities through the lens of their experiences and achievements. We are aware of the limitations of building our study on the views of a selected group of teachers. We are also aware of the fact that our researcher position influences the analysis since two of the authors (Szabó and Fenyvesi) have co-developed the course, four of them have edited the Teacher’s Handbook (Szabó, Fenyvesi, Soundararaj and Kangasvieri) and the theoretical background of the course is also based on co-authors’ (Burnard’s and Harris’) contribution. As a consequence, we consider our study a self-reflective account for the better understanding of how our work has contributed to practical teacher education on the one hand and theory building on the other hand. In other words, we as co-developers of the program take a teacher-researcher stance that we advocate, and thus exercise research-based teacher education for the further improvement of similar programs. In our analysis, we focus on teachers’ contributions to Module 4 of the course entitled “Developing learner-centered indoor and outdoor environments.” Our motivation for this choice is bifold. First, we consider learning environments an ideal subject for posthumanist inquiry since, as Pennycook (2018, p. 53) argues, material resources such as working tools, furniture but even spatial configurations have “thing-power”; that is, they form an “assemblage” of multi-layered semiosis, including human interaction. Further, this course module included reflective tasks that benefited from the Design Thinking approach (Design Thinking, n.d.)

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which offers several tools for creative co-creation in local ecologies of learning. As all modules, Module 4 also begins with information about recommended sources that provide research-based insights into creative learning environments design. Several sources also offer various (sometimes critical) standpoints from which to reflect on our own material and spatial practices. Design Thinking approach, which is in the center of the module’s assignment, raises awareness to co-exploration and empathy with future users of educational spaces. Integrating the assignment into a diverse creative ecologies model (Burnard, 2012; Harris, 2016, 2017; Figs. 6.1 and 6.2), the first stage of exploration of already existing learning environments sets the ground for the reflection on local educational policies (e.g. who has the right to display something on the wall, to introduce new arrangements of furniture, to propose tasks, etc.; cf. Szabó, 2018) which then leads to new types of processes and products, e.g., redesigning activities in which pupils are tightly involved. The involvement of pupils, parents, or lesser known teacher colleagues in classroom design is a game-changing innovation which builds on preferences and viewpoints that might be missing from the teacher’s personal professional policies-by-practice. Since human action leaves traces in the semiotic landscape, the transformation of learning environments, for example, a new setting with pupil-influenced design, call external explorers and local community members alike to rethink the material environment and revise/renew local educational practices in terms of modalities, practice principles and forms of authorship (Burnard, 2012; cf. Szabó & Troyer, 2017). That is, co-created innovation leads to a new setup which will then become the point of departure of further renewal—thus launching a cycle of iteration in creative renewal. Although not from a creativities research or Design Thinking perspective, Menken et al. (2018) have shown that recognizing some earlier unseen elements in the material environment (or recognizing the lack of some elements, e.g. script in pupil’s home languages) and a communityinvolving planning process can lead to local pedagogical reforms which can be manifested in various ways specific to the context (in Menken and colleagues’ research, such manifestations include the acquisition of

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multilingual literature to the school library or even the opening of a new study program in another language than English). In the module’s assignment, teachers were asked to submit videos in which they tell the story of the transformation of a learning environment of their choice. With defining the modality of the assignment, the goal was to make teachers observe their work environment (i.e., the school) in a mediated way, through the lens of a camera, to enhance teachers’ becoming an observer. Asking teachers to tell a story of transformation, the task aimed at gaining narratives in which teachers position themselves in the coordination system of pedagogical practices and local community relations. Below we highlight some aspects from teachers’ assignments and videos in which transformations were narrated in retrospect, sometimes referring to changes that happened a long time ago). Applying our theoretical framework (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2) to the quotes in Table 6.2, we can see in these quotes how students as partners in design were highlighted as central actors in processes that resulted in transformed physical environments to be treated as reportable products and as indications of policy change (e.g. the creation of community spaces through repurposing). The school environment is represented in terms of both the characteristics of materials (e.g. “colorful pillows”) and people’s (assumed) reaction to transformative processes (e.g. “communal feeling”). Table 6.2 Narratives on the transformation of learning environments The spirit of a school by Alpár Ferencz-Salamon, Romania Video: https://bit.ly/2Y8aX5s

Student community space by Eniko˝ Tankó, Romania Video: https://bit.ly/2RzBPsG

“Students have played a major part in designing the school environment “a former classroom turned into space for students” “Our theatre room has a major role in enhancing communal feeling” (Handbook, p. 54) “a former classroom turned into a community space for students” “It is an open space with colorful pillows, bean-bags and seats which can be rearranged” (Handbook, p. 54)

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While the participants explored their own classrooms from an external perspective through the videos, the module portfolios combined their observations in the Finnish schools and then led to comparison with their own education system. The Module 4 portfolio “The Spirit of Finnish schools: Developing learner-centered indoor and outdoor environments” was completed by Gysbert Bergsma (the Netherlands), Ágnes Földváry (Hungary), Alpár Ferencz-Salamon (Romania), and Susanna Maresca (Italy) with the support of the tutor, Tamás Péter Szabó. The participants set a focus on investigation and discussed (i) “maker spaces” inside and outside the schools; (ii) mentoring; (iii) inspiring spaces and solutions; (iv) mobility in learning environments (e.g. dynamics of changing classrooms, moving inside the classroom); and finally (v) hidden curriculum in learning environments (cf. Handbook, pp. 54–58). With the video assignments, observations, and summarized reflections, the participants conducted cross-national comparisons of the established practices. The assignments followed with visits, reflection and comparison provided an opportunity for the teachers to reconstruct their thoughts toward creativity and how it can be implemented in their classroom every day. This is evident when the participants list down concrete good practices and recommendations as key takeaways and inculcate them further in their follow-up projects. For example, with regards to mobility in the learning environment, teachers highlighted how important it was that students were allowed to move around and even do physical exercises in and outside the classrooms (Handbook, p. 19). Many concluded that both the physical environments and interpersonal relationships of teachers and pupils have created safe and confident learning environments (Handbook, p. 57). Participating teachers were assigned to do an individual follow-up project that would enhance creativity in their local school environment and community. The participants were first asked to identify a pedagogical challenge relevant in their local context. Then they planned a local action to address the challenge, implemented the plan in collaboration with colleagues, evaluated the implemented action and assessed sustainability and future actions. Teachers submitted written reports on their follow-up projects and those reports were condensed for the published Handbook.

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Follow-up projects were organized by the types of changes that the teachers did in their local school communities and by main goals identified from the teachers’ reports. This categorization (Handbook, pp. 86–89) was done by the handbook editors in order to have a better understanding on what kind of projects the teachers carried out in their local school communities. Five of the follow-up projects included the transformation of a learning environment as a type of change. Table 6.3 summarizes them in alphabetical order of authors. In this study we extended the originally published table with references to some elements of our framework (see the terms in Italics; cf. Fig. 6.2). The teachers authoring these five projects had used the available school spaces in a novel way and thought of the available spaces in a way they had not thought of them before. Follow-up projects show that the teachers used multiple creativities in developing new ways for their everyday practice. In the reports, teachers mention that one of the biggest goals they had was to support students’ participation in creating new learning spaces, which has led to experimentations with new processes to renew policies of teaching and learning. Another goal was to engage learners in learning in a different way; for example, to create a motivational context by experimenting with teaching in unconventional spaces such as “the debate room” (Francesca Ugolini; Handbook, p. 125), “the schoolyard, the ceremonial room and the hallway” (Edit Páll; Handbook, p. 110). During the course activities, teachers have learned that spaces at school are not designed only by furniture or other interior decoration, but they have an emotional and cognitive role in student empowerment and participation; especially that transformations in the physical environment come from and lead to renewed policies and processes of work in which learners are seen as partners rather than mere consumers: I think that designing community spaces at school is not only about interior design but a lot more. I would like the students to experience: that they are able to influence their everyday surroundings [and] how new ways of using the old spaces affects the behavior of the community [... and] that they can build something concrete and tactile through a democratic design process. (Ágnes Földváry; Handbook, pp. 102–103)

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Table 6.3 An overview of follow-up projects Teacher

Type of change and

Short description of the follow-up

creativity

project

Main goals

Földváry, Ágnes Learning environment

Reorganization and redesigning learning Empowering

(Hungary)

spaces: classroom and whole school. students

Pedagogical change

(Handbook, pp. 102–103)

Design creativity Maresca, Susanna (Italy)

Pedagogical approach Learning environments Cultural change

of space Playing with fairy tales (medieval poetry) Autonomy of and holding a Literary coffee: medieval students poetry came alive in a recital. (Handbook, pp. 106–107)

Performance creativity Páll, Edit (Romania)

Pedagogical approach Learning environment Gaming creativity

Rethinking the use

Focus on the community building

A week long project, during which Cooperation activities consist of different kinds of between teachers games and creative activities. (Handbook, and parents pp. 110–111)

Students’ curiosity and creativity

Schulcz, János Learning environment

Students design a family holiday for their Improving

(Hungary)

family and the teacher starts the use of students’ critical

Pedagogical tools Pedagogical approach

Google Classroom. (Handbook, pp. 116– thinking 117)

Google creativity Ugolini, Francesca (Italy)

Learning environment Pedagogical approach Playful creativity

Rethinking of the use of space

Use of different spaces inside the school Rethinking of the for playing learning games. Secondary use of space teachers working with primary teachers: learning laboratories. (Handbook, pp. 125–126)

Cooperation between teachers

Telling her narrative, Ágnes has discursively created and assigned the role of innovator to herself and defined conscious goals for further development (e.g. “I would like the students to experience…”). This might indicate that she has explored creative potential in a domain which was earlier taken for granted to her (e.g. “…is not only about… but…”). By encouraging student participation and creativity, teachers have used their multiple creativities and utilized different ecologies.

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The main purposes of the works carried out this year were to develop students’ creativity, to make them feel like protagonists and be aware of their own learning. Furthermore, we wanted to broaden the field of action by involving parents and the neighbourhood, through performing a show. The spaces used are not normally used in ordinary teaching activities. (Susanna Maresca, Handbook, pp. 106–107)

In this excerpt, Susanna created a community voice in narration (e.g. “we wanted…”), probably to strengthen a vision of a local ecosystem of partners including “parents and the neighborhood” and her colleagues. She also pointed to the creative potential of transforming unconventional learning environments in teaching processes. Not only did the teachers use physical learning spaces but also digital learning platforms such as Google Classroom. One teacher, János Schultz, found this digital platform good for evaluation and monitoring as students are comfortable using devices in a formal situation. According to his experience, “the process of control and evaluation takes place in an environment that makes them comfortable because they can even use their own mobile phones during the quiz” (János Schultz; Handbook, p. 117). Foregrounding learners’ everyday routines of using ICT can be considered an indication of the policy change process in the otherwise formal situation of the assessment of learning.

Discussion and Conclusion: “Everyday Creativity” in Teacher Professional Learning In this chapter, we have had two interrelated tasks. First, taking a posthumanist stance, we outlined an ecological framework of diverse creativities to go beyond compartmentalized approaches to creativity development which focus on certain specific aspects or skills rather than the dynamic nature of diverse creativities put to practice. In the second part of the chapter (Sects. 6.3 and 6.4), we asked how this framework can be used in the renewal of teacher professional learning. To answer the question, we presented the development process and structure of a recently implemented in-service teacher education program which aimed at bringing a

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multi-stakeholder environment into the focus and have created a dialogic learning process to facilitate the emergence of diverse pedagogical strategies. Such diverse strategies were expected to come from the various modules which all discussed different aspects of creative educational practice. Assignments enhanced reflections which were diverse in topics and modalities. Through the grouping of participants who had different backgrounds and came from different countries, course developers also aimed at facilitating diversity and constructing an observer stance which is essential for the accommodation of a teacher-researcher role. Beyond the principles of the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNAE, 2016) which sees creativities from multiple perspectives, it was especially this research-based approach that brought elements of Finnish educational practices into the discussions of an international learning community. In Sect. 6.4, we provided insights into the functioning of the focal inservice teacher education course through a Discourse Analytical look at quotes from participating teachers’ published assignments. We asked how teachers reflect on diverse creativities and the environment (human and material alike) in which they developed their follow-ups. We focused on assignments concerning learning environments and aimed at exercising a posthumanist inquiry. Based on this analysis, we discuss here what we learnt from teachers about “everyday creativity,” a concept which we believe helps educators to go beyond the limitations of the humancentered view of creativity in education, and deconstruct the dichotomies and binary oppositions that have maintained the power relations and inequalities in knowledge creation. Teachers’ self-reflective narratives have provided evidence of the pluralism of creativities as a materiality of creating new ideas and new ways of thinking. These teachers have developed different local creative ecologies and changed the relationships between school community members, creating partnerships with colleagues, pupils, parents, and school-external stakeholders. In their narratives, they referred to community-induced processes and policies as well as the material characteristics of transformations in learning environments. Attempting a working definition, we claim that everyday creativity is a manifestation of real-world learning, where the preoccupation lies with

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seeking a better understanding of multi-stakeholder collaboration and the material aspects of education. Our framework creates a rhizomatic understanding of how diverse creativities intra-act and are embedded within the creative ecologies of school. In contrast to the “pipeline” model of education, bringing the linear imagery of educational progression as the acquisition of increasing levels of abstract knowledge, we are heeding the advice of Ingold (2013, p. 68) who said that to engage in the future making we seek to not of subservience, but of one’s grasping of one’s life as being of the world, not “a part” or “apart” from it and of opening up a path and “improvising a passage […] it is to look where you are going, not to fix an endpoint.” Thus, everyday creativity is about how we come to live and think together, to create together, transcending a view of “subjects” and “objects” into a view of ongoing “becoming,” whereby the process of becoming produces matter which matters. This process is built on enactments of thinking created by the teachers and learners in the process of reconfiguring creative ecologies in micro-level creativities in the classroom. Each creativity among diverse creativities interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, and establish “sympoietic arrangements” (Haraway, 2016, p. 58) which can otherwise be known as a “creative ecology” or ecological assemblage (cf. Pennycook, 2018). In other words, we understand everyday creativity as the weft and weave of a creative ecology—a living, ever-expanding entangled web such as a school community. Everyday creativity, in consequence, offers tools and processes to overcome the limitations of national educational policies and curricula and, further, it is a manifestation of a “creative ecologies” model of the whole school change agenda operating in Finland. Posthumanist views of matter that we have built on in this study lead the way to the dynamic form of knowledge creation that arises when the focus of classroom practice is on making with materials, bodies, creatively designed tasks, and invitations to making—where teachers and learners are “makers” and “creators”; setting in motion a “cacophonous ecology” (Taylor, 2016, p. 20). Everyday creativity is one of the multiple creativities which can offer a living ever-expanding entangled act of learning, moving learning forward, not learning from, entailed in and with materials, ideas, bodies, and school communities. As the case study in this chapter has

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shown, everyday creativity as a concept/practice has the potential to transform educational agendas not only in primary and secondary but also in tertiary education, in-service teacher education, and beyond.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

7 Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in a Teacher Training School’s Change Laboratory Sakari Hyrkkö and Anu Kajamaa

Introduction In psychological studies, creativity is often defined as the capacity of an individual to create original and useful ideas, insights and solutions (see e.g., Amabile, 1996; Ekvall, 1996; West, 1990; Woodman et al., 1993; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). However, in recent years, as a response to the literature concerning creativity as a quality and mental property of an individual, or as a novel outcome of an individual’s action, we can find an increasing number of studies suggesting that this individualistic notion needs to be complemented with a broader approach, examining creativity S. Hyrkkö (B) · A. Kajamaa Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] A. Kajamaa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_7

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as a multidimensional, collective and collaborative phenomenon (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Glaveanu, 2011; Glaveanu et al., 2020; John-Steiner, 2000; Littleton et al., 2012; Runco & Beghetto, 2019; Sannino & Ellis, 2013; Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & deZutter, 2009; Slayton et al., 2019). From this perspective, the social context, culture, and communities of actors with different understandings (e.g., novices and experts) are considered central in contributing to the creative processes (Drazin et al., 1999; Glaveanu, 2011; Sawyer, 2004) and practices, such as problemsolving (Segers et al., 2018) leading to novel outcomes (Hakkarainen et al., 2013; Oddane, 2014). Nurturing creativity and finding ways to support the creation of new collaborative practices suited to local contexts is important for organizational transformation and learning. This is the case in educational contexts and for teachers’ professional learning to meet the challenges posed by the knowledge society and the fast-changing world of the twenty-first century (Córdova et al., 2012; Hakkarainen et al., 2013). Hence, in the current context of education and schools, supporting and enhancing students’ and teachers’ creativity is pivotal (Ellis, 2013; Miettinen, 2014). The available research evidence has also pointed to the significance of creativity for enhancing student’s agency and expertise, and by doing so, has taken educational systems beyond traditional school learning (Hakkarainen et al., 2013; Yamazumi, 2013). Furthermore, creativity has been shown to act as a driver for innovation and change in school settings (McCharen et al., 2011). Despite these developments, it is acknowledged that the concept of creativity is complex and multifaceted and thus often difficult to define (Amabile, 1996; Glaveanu, 2015; Lemmetty, 2020; Littleton et al., 2012). Moreover, we lack a clear understanding of the exact mechanisms whereby a culture supportive of creativity is elicited by a professional community and how new creative products emerge in collective creative activity. Hence, the existing research points to the need for further empirical research on collective (Sannino & Ellis, 2013) and distributed creativity (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009) and its connections to learning, a research gap we address in this study. Drawing from the theory of expansive learning (Engeström, 2014; Engeström et al., 2015), we view work communities as creators of

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novel concepts and models of activity, enabling them to collectively transform their practices. This involves a cyclical process of epistemic learning actions through which, by moving from abstract to concrete, the community designs and implements the new concept for their work activity (Engeström, 2014). From this perspective, learning and knowledge creation are viewed as connected, both being about recognizing differences (for example, actors with multiple, differing perspectives) and opportunities for innovation (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Following this, creativity and learning need to be investigated as intertwined (Sannino & Ellis, 2013). Therefore, our research interest lies in not only individual creative acts, but also in the interactive creative process and “visibilization” of distributed creativity and expansive learning actions. The aim of our study is to generate new research knowledge on distributed creativity and its connections to expansive learning. Drawing from sociocultural theorizing, we define creativity as a distributed process, consisting of creative acts taken by interacting individuals (also Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). Further, taking an activity-theoretical stance, we perceive distributed creativity as socio-materially mediated by discourse and available tools and artifacts (Engeström, 2014; Miettinen, 2014; Vygotsky, 1978). Moreover, we conceptualize distributed creativity as taking place within the collective activity that is objectoriented. From an activity-theoretical view, the object (e.g., for a teacher community, the students and their learning) is of crucial importance as it gives the community a long-term purpose and direction, holding it together (Engeström, 2008). However, as the object constantly evolves due to issues such as societal changes (such as a curriculum reform), tensions and contradictions can arise, and the need to transform the activity then emerges (Engeström et al., 2003). This calls for collective reconstruction efforts of the object via expansive learning, which may lead to the formation of a new, expanded understanding of the object and renewed patterns of activity oriented to the object. The context of our study is a Finnish teacher training school, subjected to a demanding curriculum reform and in need of transforming its practice. To support the school staff, our research team carried out a workplace development effort called the Change Laboratory (CL) (see

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Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) at the school, involving the teachers and their headmaster. As our research questions, we ask: (1) How creative acts emerged during the CL and (2) How the interactive creative process contributed to expansive learning. To investigate the CL meetings, we created a method for analyzing the emergence and evolvement of the process of distributed creativity. For this, we first depicted creative acts made by individual participants to which the others responded. We then traced how these acts accumulated in interaction into creative leaps, novel conceptualizations of the work activity mediating and facilitating expansive learning actions over the course of the CL process. In addition to analyzing creativity in discourse, we directed our attention to socio-material mediation (Engeström, 2014; Miettinen, 2014; Vygotsky, 1978) and the actors’ body postures and physical movement (see also Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; John-Steiner, 2000; Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). This enabled the depiction of the embodied actions and products generated during the creative process. Taken together, our analysis captured a dynamic interplay between the discursive and embodied creative acts, creative leaps and expansive learning actions toward the development of an entirely new concept of shared pedagogical leadership. Later in the Change Laboratory, this process materialized into a tangible new pedagogical leadership model for the school. Our study contributes to the research connecting collective forms of creativity and learning. More specifically, it offers a novel analytical method for analyzing and conceptualizing processes of distributed creativity in organizations. Further, our analysis adds to the research on expansive learning by linking the process of distributed creativity and expansive learning actions, to explain better how creative products may be designed collectively. Moreover, our findings could be useful for supporting educational change via collectively developed concepts and models of pedagogical leadership. Our study also informs teachers’ professional learning and designing and conducting processes of work development within schools. Finally, our analysis highlights the facilitative role of activity-theoretical interventions in creative processes and learning in organizations.

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Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning In previous studies, creativity has been explored on many levels. Inspired by psychology and cognitive science, often applying psychometric approaches, the analysis of creativity has traditionally considered creativity to be a quality and mental property of individuals, or a novel outcome of an individual’s action (see e.g., Amabile, 1996; Ekvall, 1996; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999; West, 1990; Woodman et al., 1993). Since the 1980s and especially during the 1990s, scholars started to move the research attention from individuals to the distribution of cognition across actors, artifacts/tools, and the context and systems in which these operate (Greeno, 2006; Hutchins, 1995; Salomon, 1993; Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). In the context of work, creativity is crucial for knowledge sharing, collaboration, achieving shared understanding (Ludvigsen & Nerland, 2013), and for the development of professional agency (Collin et al., 2017). Creativity can then be seen as a process (Drazin et al., 1999; Glaveanu, 2011; Sawyer, 2004), and as a problem-solving activity in which the participants use and introduce new knowledge resources (Segers et al., 2018). Furthermore, creativity is important for supporting organizational development, innovativeness, and competitiveness, as creative outcomes include novelty and usability (Gruys et al., 2011; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2009). To this end, organizational culture supportive of learning and creativity can act as a driver for innovation and change (McCharen et al., 2011; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Furthermore, studies connecting creativity and innovation make important contributions to the development of contemporary working life and organizations (e.g., Anderson et al., 2014; Schulz et al., 2017). Importantly, they also pay attention to the role of collaboration in creative processes and innovation generation. Connecting different levels of creativity, and taking a multilevel and systemic view, Anderson and colleagues (2014) define creativity as consisting of four levels, namely the individual level (containing e.g. personality traits, orientation to learning, cognitive abilities, autonomy), group (e.g. the structure and composition of the group), organizational level (use of knowledge networks, organizational strategy and structure,

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material and immaterial resources) and integrative level (connections between the previous levels, and various related aspects). More precisely, they define creativity and innovation in a work context as: --- the process, outcomes, and products of attempts to develop and introduce new and improved ways of doing things. The creativity stage of this process refers to idea generation, and innovation to the subsequent stage of implementing ideas toward better procedures, practices, or products. (Anderson et al., 2014, p. 1298)

Drawing from a collectivist, sociocultural stance, Hakkarainen (2013) defines creativity as an object-oriented process, cultivated by shared knowledge practices of innovative knowledge communities and their networks. Creative achievements are hence viewed as transactive processes involving novelty, innovation, agency, and the transformation of a network of mutually supporting actors (Hakkarainen, 2013). Scholars of cultural-historical activity theory, and the theory of expansive learning as its application to the context of work and organizations (e.g., Engeström, 2014), emphasize the object-oriented nature of collective activity. Focusing on collective processes of knowledge creation, they highlight that creative efforts are needed in order to generate learning and to produce novel and societally relevant concepts and outcomes (Engeström, 2011; Sannino & Ellis, 2013). This necessitates multiple actors and a dialog among them, as well as tools and artifacts to support the collaborative process (Engeström, 2008; Engeström et al., 2014; Yamazumi, 2013). For example, some sociocultural studies conducted in educational settings show that creative learning environments within schools, which include a rich constellation of tools and artifacts such as collaborative technologies, digital tools, and craftbased materials, can become powerful mediating devices for enhancing the students’ creativity, knowledge creation and learning (Hakkarainen, 2009; Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020; Kajamaa et al., 2019; Riikonen et al., 2020). Previous research on collective creativity has also pointed out critical features that call for attention. It is well acknowledged that collective creativity is a complex phenomenon (Amabile, 1996; Glaveanu,

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2015; Littleton et al., 2012), and it can involve personal and societal paradoxes (Lemmetty, 2020), struggles and tensions, as well as critical transitions in the complex efforts of learning (Sannino, 2013). Furthermore, the unpredictability of creative processes adds to the complexity. For example, Sawyer and deZutter (2009, p. 82) state that “distributed creativity ranges from relatively predictable and constrained, to relatively unpredictable and unconstrained,” stressing that the processes in which truly novel and unexpected things may collaboratively emerge tend to be relatively unconstrained. These unpredictable, shared creative processes closely resemble the process of expansive learning of “something that is not yet there” that takes place among a group of actors (Engeström, 2014), and we have thus chosen this approach as our theoretical lens. A formative workplace intervention method based on the theory of expansive learning, the Change Laboratory (see Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) provides its participants with research-based tools and a relatively unrestricted learning environment. The CL facilitates interaction, “multi-voicedness” and shared creative processes. It also allows for deviations from the script of the interventionist researchers facilitating the process, as well as from the scripts and ways of working of the participants in the activity systems under scrutiny (see Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Further, by definition, expansive learning is a collective process, aimed at overcoming tensions and potentially leading to the formation of a new, expanded and (at least partially) shared object of activity between the participants. In this, tensions and contradictions are seen as inherent features of organizational life and as potential drivers of change, learning, and innovation creation (Engeström, 2014), and, in our view, also for the emergence of distributed creativity (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). With the aim to generate new research knowledge on distributed creativity and its connections to expansive learning, we analyze these among a group of teachers with diverse opinions, during a demanding curriculum change calling for transformations in their work activity.

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Study Research Setting The school under study serves as a school for local children but also as a teacher training facility, its main tasks being teaching, research, and supervision of pre-service teachers. Its aims also include developing high-quality teaching and curriculum planning to serve the national Finnish schooling system. The school comprises an elementary school (pupils aged 7–12), a secondary school (13–15), and an upper secondary school (16–18) with nearly 1,000 students overall. The participants in the Change Laboratory were from the elementary school. This school, along with other Finnish elementary and secondary schools, was facing transformational needs due to a curriculum reform. Implemented gradually from 2016, the new Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education calls for enhanced collaboration, teamwork, and distributed forms of practice from the teachers. One of the key objectives of the new curriculum is to promote the students’ all-round development and lifelong learning through “transversal competence,” a Finnish take on OECD’s twenty-first century skills framework. To reach the new learning outcomes derived from this, the curriculum calls for integrative learning and interdisciplinary studying in schools, crossing the traditional boundaries of individual teachers’ work (see also e.g., Engeström, 2008) and encouraging new forms of collaboration (Uljens & Rajakaltio, 2017). In Finland, teachers typically enjoy a high degree of autonomy in planning and executing their own teaching as well as the evaluation of students and their learning outcomes (Sahlberg, 2011; Simola, 2015), within the boundaries set in the curriculum. Considered to be the best pedagogical experts in their work communities, teachers usually also take part in designing their school-specific curricula, building on the municipal curriculum and the national core curriculum. However, with the new national core curriculum’s increased demands for collaboration in planning, teaching, and evaluation, new forms of collaboration and shared working are required from teachers.

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To meet these new needs better, a Change Laboratory (CL) workplace intervention process (see e.g., Engeström et al., 1996, 2002; Kerosuo et al., 2010; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) was launched at the school. The CL was suggested to the headmaster by our research group. We were interested in how this school, supervising pre-service teachers and having a special status in the Finnish educational system, responds to the curriculum reform. Participants in the CL were elementary school class teachers, special education teachers, and the elementary school headmaster. Fourteen participants from the school took part in the CL, with between six and nine school personnel attending each meeting. Participation was voluntary, and the weekly meetings were held on the school’s premises. The CL is a participatory method, the aim of which is to help organizational actors to understand the systemic nature and the developmental needs of their daily activities. System-level organizational changes can be achieved through means of talk (Haapasaari et al., 2014; Sannino, 2008), by examining tensions and contradictions and developing new models and renewed work practices as a community (Engeström et al., 2007, 2010). The process also aims to foster and guide the practitioners’ collective, expansive learning and transformative agency. The CL interventions typically follow a series of epistemic learning actions—questioning, analyzing, modeling, examining the model, and so forth—depicted as an expansive learning cycle (see Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013; also Engeström, 2014).

Data Collection To understand distributed creativity in our data better, it is important to direct research attention to the real-time micro-processes of creativity “in action” (see Sawyer & deZutter, 2009, p. 82). In the case of our study, this means six video-recorded CL meetings (see Table 7.1 for details), serving as the primary data source for this chapter. The meetings were recorded using two video cameras on opposite sides of the meeting room and an audio recorder. For the most part, the data are very clear and of high quality. Minor shortcomings include occasional inaudible speech

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Table 7.1 Duration, speaking turns and attendees at the Change Laboratory meetings

Meeting 1 Meeting 2 Meeting 3 Meeting 4 Meeting 5 Meeting 6

Duration

Number of speaking turns

New teachers

Senior teachers

Headmaster

93 min

575

2

6

-

103 min

564

1

7

1

98 min

590

1

6

1

95 min

592

2

4

-

98 min

782

1

7

1

93 min

1491

1

5

-

or it not be possible to name the speaker, especially when determining whether a speaker is a teacher or one of the researchers. The video and audio data of the participants’ interactions in the meetings were transcribed verbatim, resulting in 276 pages of transcription consisting of 4594 speaking turns. The transcriptions were used in the analysis, supporting the video and audio data. Table 7.1 indicates the duration, number of speaking turns, and attendees at the CL meetings. It reveals that toward the end of the process, especially in meetings 5 and 6, there were dramatically more speaking turns than in the first four meetings, implying shorter speaking turns and less silence. A distinction was made between “senior” and “new” teachers among the participants (see Table 7.1), new teachers having worked at the school for less than a year. We considered this to be a useful grouping for the analysis, as the input by these groups for the creative process was rather distinct: senior participants drew heavily from their knowledge of the existing structures and issues of the school, while the newer teachers brought up their previous experiences from other schools as examples of good practices. This distinction was also driven by the teachers’ eagerness to emphasize their backgrounds and work experiences at the beginning of the CL.

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The transcribed excerpts, presented in the findings section, feature the following codes for the participants: senior teacher (ST), new teacher (NT), headmaster (PR), researcher (RR), and undefined person (U), replacing their names and accompanied by a running number. Other codes include unclear speech (--), interruption (#), overlapping speech (##), and speaking turn continuing or left open (…). Other recognizable details, such as names of persons not participating in the process and place names, have been altered for anonymity.

Data Analysis We set out to discover how creative acts emerged during the CL and how the interactive creative process contributed to expansive learning. In the analysis of our data, we used an iterative approach, which is an inductive form of analysis that “encourages reflection upon the active interests, current literature, granted priorities and various theories the researcher brings to the data” (Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009, p. 77). On this basis, the data were first approached by viewing the entire video corpus (i.e., the six CL meetings) and then focusing on selected episodes of interaction in which we could witness the emergence of distributed creativity (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009) and actions and conceptualizations that would constitute expansive learning (Engeström, 2014). In the three-step analysis of the data, we paid close attention to expressive and emotional aspects of interaction that are visible and audible in the video data but are not entirely carried over to the textual transcriptions, such as body postures, physical movement, gestures, nodding, seeking eye contact etc., to deepen our analysis and interpretations of the creative process (see also Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; John-Steiner, 2000; Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). We also focused our attention on socio-material mediation and production of tools and artifacts (see also Engeström, 2014; Kajamaa & Kumpulainen, 2020; Miettinen, 2014; Riikonen et al., 2020) during the creative process. We considered an interaction episode to have ended when the participants withdrew from the discussion topic. We also paid attention to who made the creative

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initiative and who took part in the interaction, distinguishing between participants and facilitators. As the first step of our analysis, we analyzed excerpts in which a participant made a creative act, meaning that an individual verbally proposed an original initiative to which other participants responded with new creative acts, building interaction around the proposed subject of discussion. As cues to coding the creative acts, we typically found in the data a sudden change of subject, interruption to take the floor, the introduction of an out-of-the-box idea, or commencing a physical activity such as drawing a tentative model. However, not all initiatives resulted in creative interaction and creative products, but looking at the data post hoc, we could focus on the initiatives that eventually lead to fruitful interaction. Such episodes typically had “an unpredictable outcome, rather than a scripted, known endpoint” (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009, p. 82). During the analysis, we soon noticed that the multiple consecutive creative acts typically accumulated in the interaction over the course of the CL meetings, resulting in novel, shared conceptualizations of the work activity which we call creative leaps, forming the second step of our analysis. In examining the incremental formation of these conceptualizations, our attention was focused on tracing and identifying aspects of the interaction in which the participants furthered collective knowledge creation, such as seeking eye contact and nodding as a sign of appropriation or leaving one’s speaking turn “open-ended.” By this, we mean not ending one’s turn with an assertive tone, but rather slowing the pace toward the end of the turn, leaving sentences unfinished, providing others with room to talk, and simultaneously using extralinguistic means to invite others to continue the creative process. As the third analytical step, we analyzed the data for expansive learning actions—namely the participants’ collective actions of (1) questioning the current work practices, (2) analyzing tensions and contradictions in the work activity, and (3) modeling a new solution for transforming the work activity (Engeström, 2014)—that by the end of the CL process led to the collective creation of a new pedagogical leadership model. Modeling here is viewed as an especially pivotal learning action in terms of the creation of the tangible creative product, and thus much of our analytical attention and reporting of the findings focus on this learning action.

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In this context, modeling means articulating the discovered explanatory relationships in a simplified model of the new idea that offers a solution for the problem, for example (see Engeström, 2014). When examined in conjunction with expansive learning actions, creative leaps were found to coincide with the progress of this collective learning process. A creative leap thus was found to act as a mediating intermediate concept between an action (creative acts) and activity (expansive learning).

Findings: Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in the Change Laboratory In this section, we present the findings resulting from our analysis of the Change Laboratory meetings. We decided to focus our presentation on findings from the third and sixth meetings, as the third meeting marked a turning point when the group began moving toward conceptualizing and modeling the new pedagogical leadership model, which took a concrete form in the sixth meeting. Further, it was not before the third session that the group began to exhibit characteristics of distributed creativity; in other words, it was when the creative acts and creative leaps emerged. Notably, there was a dramatic increase in the number of speaking turns in the sixth meeting (see Table 7.1) as the group became more aligned to a creative mindset, and the modeling intensified. Our analysis also suggests that the members of the group became more comfortable with the process, had more trust in each other and the facilitating researchers, and were increasingly willing to express tentative ideas that would be either overridden or built on further in the ensuing interaction.

Interaction Episode 1: Searching for the Shared Object of the Collective Activity The first two meetings of the Change Laboratory process had involved a lot of questioning, criticizing, and rejecting some aspects of the current,

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historically evolved practices and the existing wisdom. This can be interpreted as an expansive learning action of questioning (see above). By the third meeting, the participants had reached an agreement that the school was lacking a common vision to support the teachers in carrying out their core activities, namely teaching, pre-service teacher supervision, and research. This need for a vision was amplified by the changes brought about by the new national core curriculum and its effects on the school’s own curriculum work. To note, the headmaster was present at this meeting. So far, the concept of “pupil” had not surfaced in the meetings, as the teachers had been discussing the tensions and struggles they experienced related to their own work, as well as broader organizational and leadership issues of the school. This interaction episode illustrates how, after about 40 min into the third CL meeting, the researchers introduced the notion of “pupil” to direct the discussion toward analyzing the situation and moving toward resolving the challenges and tensions. The following excerpt demonstrates how the researcher’s (RR1) introduction of the notion of pupils triggered what we interpret as the initiating creative act of this episode, that is a proposal initiated by a senior teacher (ST6) for a potential common vision for the school. 1215 RR1: --- The idea here has been, like you mentioned, that it would be good to have some common goal or common object, so it would be somehow more like that forest [than just the trees], or to have this kind of framework, [---] could it be some sort of common thing to help you, make it more flexible, easier to work with the pupils. 1218 ST6 : Just to make something up, for example social justice, or acknowledging the society in schoolwork. I think those could be… 1219 ST3: Those are, like, wider concepts. 1220 ST6 : I could be wrong --- but I think those are the kinds of... 1221 RR1: Yeah. 1222 ST6 : common goals. 1223 ST3: Yes, yes! 1224 RR1: Right, ST6, this is just what we are after with this [discussion], answers, these kinds of answers. 1225 ST6 : Yeah.

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Although the proposal was not meant to be an actual suggestion for a common vision, the researchers and other participants took it as such, altering the interactional effect of the proposal. This illustrates the contingency of the creative process (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009) through which consecutive creative acts alter the meaning of the earlier acts. 1264 ST6 : Please note that I didn’t suggest it as a common object, but I just gave an example of the level of abstraction that could be. 1265 U : ## Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah.

A second creative act emerged as another senior teacher (ST9) proposed the contents of the new curriculum as a potential common vision. However, the participants soon realized the difficulty of finding answers to their current transformational needs from the rather normative curriculum document, as illustrated in the next excerpt. 1292 ST9: Is there something in the new curriculum that would be such --1293 ST6 : Well, there are those, transversal competencies are in there, seven of those. 1294 ST9: Right. So, would one of those be such a thing then? 1295 ST6 : You can’t highlight just one. So, we must in any case strive for those, because they are stated in the curriculum. 1296 ST2: They are norms.

After a brief discussion on the new curriculum, senior teacher ST3 made the third creative act, proposing the notion of the children’s future. This elaboration of the initiatives proposed earlier—the pupil, the society, and the curriculum—synthesized them into a collective proposal for a shared object of activity, now perceived by the participants as children learning to function skillfully and successfully in the future society. 1313 ST3: I was thinking that when ST6 mentioned that acknowledging of the surrounding people society [sic], so aren’t all those transversal competencies somehow related to how the child can then cope, will survive, what kinds of skills they need in order to function in that society of the future? 1314 ST6 : Yeah, because they are all parts of the transversal competence.

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1315 ST3: ## Yeah, yeah. 1316 ST6 : All the teaching subjects rely on developing those. 1317 ST3: ##Yes, yes, yes. – So, could that be made into a common thing like that? 1318 RR2: How the child copes. 1319 ST3: Yes. 1320 RR1: What kinds of skills does the child get for functioning in the society. 1321 ST3: Yeah, that exactly.

In terms of expansive learning, this first interaction episode can be described as constituting a qualitative, expansive transition from a need for change, to conceptualizing the shared object of activity (Engeström, 2008). Further, we consider this to be crucial from the viewpoint of questioning the current practices. It is also an important step in moving toward the expansive learning action of analyzing the current situation (Engeström, 2014). The excerpts presented in this first interaction episode illustrate a succession and accumulation of three creative acts, with several features associated with the emergence of distributed creativity: changing the interactional effect of an act by subsequent acts, contingency in which consecutive creative acts depend and build on one another, and collaboration through which each participant contributes equally (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). As a result of this interaction, a creative leap was formed when a rather unexpected outcome, namely a proposal for a shared object of activity for the school, emerged, contributing to the expansive learning of the CL participants.

Interaction Episode 2: Envisioning a Dynamic Team Model for Pedagogical Collaboration The fourth CL meeting focused on collectively analyzing the historical development of the teacher training school and identifying the main tensions of the current activity system derived from historical reasons. Then, the fifth meeting was already foreshadowing the modeling process depicted below, with discussions around the possible team structures and the teams’ role in the school’s pedagogical leadership.

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In the latter half of the sixth meeting, consensus among the CL participants had been reached that to enhance pedagogical collaboration, teacher teams divided by grade level were considered essential for designing the school’s local curriculum, building on the new national core curriculum. However, the development work of the school’s research, pre-teacher supervision, and teaching duties were not seen to fit this kind of grade-level division. Despite this, the participants began to design a model based on grade-level teams. What we consider to be the initiating creative act of this episode, the first draft (see Fig. 7.1) of the team-based leadership model was drawn by senior teacher ST5, summarizing the jointly developed ideas so far. To note, the headmaster was not present at this meeting. As demonstrated in the following excerpt, the participants then quite critically reflected on the first model (Fig. 7.1), criticizing it as a traditional-looking top-down organizational model with the headmasters at the top of the hierarchy. This triggered a second creative act made by new teacher NT1, suggesting a novel idea that the model might be based on a ring shape. Senior teacher ST6, who had opposed the previous

Fig. 7.1 Photograph of the first version of the new model, drawn by the teachers

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hierarchical model, then voiced his support for this idea, and encouraged NT1 to start drawing a ring-shaped model. 3537 NT1: I also was thinking that is it… that this is now like a hierarchical model, which is then… 3538 ST6 : # It is a military model. 3539 NT1: It’s not logical, easy to understand. 3540 ST5: But didn’t we… did we discuss a thing like this? Have we discussed this? 3541 NT1: ## But I mean could it be in the shape of a ring? 3542 ST3: I think we have been discussing that kind of --3543 ST5: ## Yeah, because I think we need to talk… 3544 ST3: # My idea from last time was that sort. 3545 ST5: Right. 3546 ST3: But I mean now we could take a totally... 3547 ST5: Right. 3548 ST6 : Draw a ring, let’s do it this way! [giving paper to NT1]

As the sixth meeting progressed, the ring metaphor was expanded with various new attributes, such as the sun, a dartboard, a shooting target, and a doughnut. When discussing the possible new versions of the model, there was a lot of talking over each other and laughter, indicating that the group had transitioned into a more creative mode of collaboration (see Engeström et al., 2015). We also view this shift as a collective effort to break traditional school hierarchies and to create a space in which everybody was free to voice their ideas. In the next excerpt, as the third creative act, we illustrate how senior teacher ST6 then introduced the concept of having grade-level teams and function-specific teams (for research, supervision and teaching) side by side in the model. This idea was triggered by the ring-shaped model which at this point functioned as a shared socio-material mediator, mediating the discussion and continuation of the drawing activity. 3564 ST6 : So, how about having these [teams] on the circle, so that some of them are divided by age, but then there would also be functional ones. The doughnut would look like this. [starts drawing a new picture]

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Figure 7.2 presents “the doughnut model” drawn by senior teacher ST6 with grade-level teams (1–2, 3–4 and 5–6) and function-specific teams (teaching, supervision and research, left to right), in later iterations replaced by a division by class letter (A, B and C) or school building floor (1st, 2nd and 3rd). In the ensuing, fast-paced co-planning of the future division of labor, a team segmentation was created that would later end up in the final model. As illustrated in the following excerpt, new teacher NT1, building on ST6’s idea, made the fourth creative act of the episode, presenting an idea that the teachers could work flexibly in either grade-level teams or function-specific teams. 3575 NT1: [---] …then there would be a research group, a supervision group and a teaching group. 3576 ST6 : Yes, these three.

Fig. 7.2 Photograph of “the doughnut model” initiated by senior teacher ST6

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NT1: So, we would in fact have six teams. We operate either this or that way [showing different directions across the “doughnut”]. ST6 : ## Well, there you go! U : Yes, yes.

In terms of expansive learning, this second interaction episode illustrates the participants alternating between the epistemic learning actions of analyzing their current work activity and modeling the new solution (see Engeström, 2014). In this episode, the four consecutive creative acts accumulated into a creative leap, accelerating the expansive learning process, and the collective formation of a new concept (Engeström et al., 2015) for organizing pedagogical teamwork in a dynamic way. The distributed creative activity in this episode began with ST6’s resistance of hierarchies and “military-like” models and materialized in a dynamic circular model that would allow flexible work practices. As in the first interaction episode (from the third meeting), the interaction presented in the second episode (from the sixth meeting) also illustrates a succession of creative acts with several features associated with the emergence of distributed creativity (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). The dynamic model (Fig. 7.2) that emerged as a result of the creative leap, described herein, offered a tentative solution for the contradiction of differing requirements for teamwork between curriculum work and developmental work (i.e., research, supervision and teaching), acting as a starting point for the creative activity in the next interaction episode.

Interaction Episode 3: Inventing a Dynamic Model for Pedagogical Leadership When just over an hour of the sixth meeting had passed, in the middle of a conversation about the teams’ role in the school’s pedagogical decisionmaking, new teacher NT1 spontaneously started drawing a new model, constituting the first creative act of this episode. 3820 NT1: So, this thing, that if there are now all the headmasters here in the middle, if we wanted to be around them, then here would be the team leaders, these three, these ones.

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3821 ST5: Right, would it be called a steering group, or what shall we call it? 3822 ST3: ## Yeah, steering group. 3823 N : Yes.

NT1 then drew teachers to be situated on “the ring” outside the steering group, divided into teams A, B and C, as per ST6’s earlier suggestion. In her vision, each team would move on the ring depending on the subject it is dealing with. Functions (teaching, supervision and research) and grade levels (1–2, 3–4 and 5–6) were drawn as separate units outside the circular model. However, there was no clear idea of how the division of teams by class letter (A, B and C) would fit the functions and gradelevel tasks. As shown in the next excerpt, the speaking turn ended up wavering, with extralinguistic signaling to others to continue the thought process. 3841 NT1: …see, these Bs are moving here like this. 3842 ST3: ## Okay, so they are moving entirely, right. 3843 NT1: So, here would be the grade levels, and here would be the teaching, supervision and research. [writing outside the circle model] So then, we could meet either in these teams or these teams. And then there would be the teachers’ meetings, and then these Bs are revolving around here according to whether they are here in the 1–2 grade team, or if it is the one responsible for supervision, then it leads this team. So, these all have, like, two, it’s schizophrenic when they must have two perspectives in that sense.

This triggered the second creative act by senior teacher ST5, who started drawing an alternative model consisting of multiple rings, with no “classletter teams.” NT1 then joined the creative process, mediated by the new version of the model (see Fig. 7.3). 3844 ST5: I thought you were drawing this kind of thing, where here would be the steering group and headmaster, or headmaster and steering group, and here would be the team leaders. [drawing rings, and new rings around them] 3845 NT1: Yeah. 3846 ST3: I thought that too. Then the next step ---

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Fig. 7.3 Photograph of further iterations of the model drawn by NT1 (left) and ST5 (right)

3847 ST5: ## I thought this would become this kind of model that starts to grow. [drawing more rings] 3848 NT1: ## You could put it there! You could put the teachers in like this. 3849 ST5: Yes.

The researchers did not take part in the drawing process. However, at this point, RR1 made the third creative act of this episode by pointing to the models (Fig. 7.3) and suggesting combining ST5’s idea of a circularly unfolding model with multiple rings with NT1’s idea of a job description of a team moving dynamically on the ring according to their task (a metaphor for a compass needle). ST6 invented the name “compass model” from the term “pedagogical compass” first uttered by the researcher. 3850 RR1: Is that a bit like a pedagogical compass then, so that it is, like, dynamic. So, it won’t be like this [gesturing up-down-movement], but instead it moves like this [gesturing a circulating movement]. 3851 ST5: Yes, then we… 3852 RR1: Isn’t that what you were after there, ST6?

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ST5: Oh, yeah. ST6 : Compass model, it is a compass model. ST3: A compass. ST5: Now we’re on the map! RR2: There’s some paper then, let’s draw a big compass! ST6, a bigger compass right there.

In terms of expansive learning, this third interaction episode represents the epistemic learning action of modeling a new solution, as well as the first steps toward examining the model (Engeström, 2014). As in the first and second interaction episodes, the excerpts from the third interaction episode also illustrate a succession of creative acts with several features associated with the emergence of distributed creativity (Sawyer & deZutter, 2009). This episode, with simultaneous drawing of models by the three participants, constituted the final creative leap of the Change Laboratory process, articulating the essential operational ideas of the new leadership model. After this, the sixth meeting ended with a collaborative drawing of the final version of the model, which incorporated the novel ideas jointly created by the participants during the CL. The meeting thus generated a tangible creative artifact, a new pedagogical leadership model for transforming the collaborative work practices in the school community. The final model was named the “Compass model for distributed pedagogical leadership” by one of the participants.

Discussion and Conclusion In our chapter, we have been motivated to widen the understanding of distributed creativity and expansive learning in the context of a teacher training school. We investigated how creative acts emerged in the interaction during a Change Laboratory (CL) process and how the interactive creative process contributed to expansive learning. We explored creativity as a socially distributed process taking place in the interaction of a group of individuals participating in the CL. For viewing creativity and learning through the lens of sociocultural theorizing and activity theory, a fruitful starting point was to examine a heterogenous and “multi-voiced”

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group of professionals, consisting of both experienced teachers, a school headmaster, and new teachers. In this research setting, properties of individuals or attributes of creativity were not the focus of scrutiny. Instead, we were interested to investigate how the CL participants contributed to the interactive process by which distributed creativity and expansive learning of “something that is not yet there” took place. Our findings illustrate how creativity and novel creative products emerged as a result of a collective interactive process. In the process, we discovered multiple sequences of creative acts, innovative initiatives to which other participants responded, accumulating over the course of the CL meetings into what could best be described as creative leaps. This process involved interaction in which the ideas discussed were developed into novel shared conceptualizations of pedagogical collaboration and leadership, contributing to the group’s expansive learning. Towards the end of the CL, the creative process materialized into a tangible artifact, namely a new pedagogical leadership model for transforming the teachers’ collaborative work practices. While the theory of expansive learning is well-suited to explaining systemic, collaborative learning, activity-theoretical studies focusing on creativity are rare. Our chapter responds to this need by providing new knowledge on the micro-level processes of distributed creativity contributing to the process of expansive learning. In line with previous studies showing that a culture supporting creativity and collaboration are pivotal for fostering professional learning (e.g. Cordova et al., 2012; McCharen et al., 2011), our findings confirm that a participatory method, such as the Change Laboratory, can aid building such a culture. Moreover, resonating with previous research exploring CL meetings (e.g. Haapasaari et al., 2014; Kerosuo et al., 2010; Sannino, 2008), our study demonstrates how it is possible to create new concepts and models of activity through means of talk and socio-material mediation, to achieve system-level changes in organizational activity. The CL process was carried out in six consecutive sessions, and it was not before the third session that the group began to exhibit characteristics of distributed creativity. The first key moment for this creative process to emerge, described in the first interaction episode in our findings section, was a shared agreement about a vision or a broader purpose

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for the school. In light of expansive learning, this relates to the reconceptualization of the object of activity which, when connected to the need states expressed earlier, “gains motivating force that gives shape and direction to activity” (Engeström, 2008, p. 89). The emergence of the shared object then enabled the group to move from discussing tensions and challenges to start jointly envisioning a new model for pedagogical collaboration. Thus, the first interaction episode can be seen as a springboard (Engeström, 2014) for a creative process in which the modeling of a new collaborative pedagogical practice eventually took place. The second and the third interaction episodes, described in our findings, exemplify the further steps of the expansive learning process, driven by the processes of distributed creativity, and the materialization of the discussion into a dynamic model of shared pedagogical leadership, drawn by the teachers. In conclusion, our chapter contributes to the understanding of creativity as an object-oriented and distributed process, including tensions and innovation creation, manifested in the multifaceted interactions within a group of people. We have also discussed the role of creative processes in expansive learning, contributing to and intertwined with the epistemic learning actions of questioning, analyzing, and modeling in the cyclical process of expansive learning. As a methodological contribution, this study proposes creative leap as an intermediate mediating concept between creative acts found in interaction and expansive learning. Further, our results suggest that, as a participatory interventionist method, the Change Laboratory can be a useful tool for eliciting creativity and collaborative work development in schools as professional contexts. There are limitations to this study that require consideration. Our analysis needs to be seen as our first step toward developing an activityoriented “grammar” of distributed creativity in connection to expansive learning, and the ideas presented in this chapter require further investigation as well as theoretical-methodological elaboration. Further research attention could be directed to the longitudinal investigation of the development of individuals’ creative, agentive actions over time. Also, how collective creative processes connect to learning and contribute to the development of a workplace culture calls for further investigation.

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Further research is also needed to improve understanding of the role of leadership, both in individual leaders and as a distributed phenomenon, in fostering creative practices and expansive learning within a community.

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8 Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning Ari Tuhkala, Kirsi Syynimaa, Kirsi Lainema, Joni Lämsä, Timo Lainema, and Raija Hämäläinen

Introduction Learning and creativity are essential resources that enable companies to develop new innovations (Sunley et al., 2019). Further, they enable employees to invent new ideas (such as new products and services), The original version of this chapter was revised: This chapter was previously published non-open access. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-77066-2_14

A. Tuhkala (B) · K. Syynimaa · K. Lainema · J. Lämsä · R. Hämäläinen Department of Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] K. Syynimaa e-mail: [email protected] K. Lainema e-mail: [email protected] J. Lämsä e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2023 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_8

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explore more efficient ways of collaborating, and find new ways of increasing customer satisfaction (DeFilippi et al., 2007; Jeong & Shin, 2019). These new ideas can emerge in everyday working situations, such as when an employee renews a shop’s decorations, helps a bank customer to invest in the stock market, or repairs software in a hospital. These individual processes can be supported by allowing employees to work in teams, enabling them to share knowledge, skills, and expertise (Gallavan & Kottler, 2012; Sawyer, 2012). Learning how to provide support is a key part of effective human resources management and commonly included in leadership training curricula of business schools. It is generally accepted that both creativity and learning can be enhanced through collaboration (Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011; Paulus & Nijstad, 2003; Resnick & Robinson, 2017). We understand the concept of collaborative creativity as generating novel and useful outputs from the shared processes and activities of team members, which ensures the output benefits a broader community than the team members themselves (Craft, 2008). Similarly, we see collaborative learning as a combination of shared learning processes, such as knowledge building among team members (Khanlari et al., 2017), and shared learning activities, such as the negotiation of shared meanings (Pea, 1993 as cited in Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011). In collaborative learning, team members interact with each other through shared learning processes and activities to achieve their joint goals together (Dillenbourg, 1999). Moreover, seeing the value of others as a resource is a prerequisite for collaborative interaction (Arvaja, 2012), which cannot be achieved by splitting the work and solving separate sub-tasks individually (Dillenbourg, 1999, p. 8). Therefore, collaborative learning can be educationally valuable by appropriating different voices, such as ‘hearing’ each other’s

R. Hämäläinen e-mail: [email protected] T. Lainema Department of Teacher Education, University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

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point of view without rejecting one’s own or other’s differing voices (Arvaja & Hämäläinen, 2021). Using digital tools to foster both collaborative creativity and learning has become a topic of interest recently. These tools offer conditions that can help employees generate new ideas and implement them in practice (Oldham & Silva, 2015). In computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), digital tools mediate, facilitate, and foster interaction among participants (Ludvigsen & Steier, 2019; Stahl et al., 2014). Thus, besides seeing the team members as resources for each other, digital tools may also provide learning resources (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2010) that foster the generation of novel ideas in CSCL (Lämsä, 2020). This chapter contributes to the on-going discussion with the aim of providing empirical and practice-based examples of fostering collaborative learning and creativity using a special type of simulation software—RealGame (Lainema, 2003). RealGame is a virtual business game that simulates the supply chain and operations of a manufacturing company. In this environment, teams of participants compete against each other in a shared simulated market. We derive empirical examples from a case where undergraduate business students from seven different countries participated in the simulation game. These students represent future business leaders, studying topics such as management and professional communication based on up-todate knowledge. Hence, they are the ones whose task will be to consider how teams are led in continuously digitizing work environment. To conduct research on this topic, we asked the students to write reflective essays about their RealGame experiences and analyzed how collaborative creativity and learning manifested in the students’ essays. We begin with a theoretical discussion regarding the similarities and differences of collaborative creativity and learning, then consider these concepts in relation to RealGame. We describe the case and the analytical procedures, then present the illustrative examples. Finally, we summarize the aspects of how RealGame fostered collaborative learning and creativity and discuss possible future research.

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RealGame as an Environment for Fostering Collaborative Learning and Creativity We understand that collaborative learning and creativity overlap, as both can result in significant outputs through complex collaborations (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). In their review Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen have defined that creativity (novel, useful ideas and outcomes using imagination on a spectrum of collaborative and individual activity Craft, 2008) is very close to constructivist approach to learning. Additionally, both creativity and collaborative learning are culturally shared and interactive processes. Furthermore, both involve novelty, but in a different way. The difference between the concepts relates to the novelty and usefulness of a process or output for the surrounding community and/or the group itself. Namely, learning refers ‘new for learner(s)’; creativity means ‘new also for the domain’ (see also Moran, 2010). Thus, even though researchers have illustrated correspondence between creativity and collaborative learning (Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008), we still have to consider them as separate entities. A practical difference between collaborative learning and creativity is associated with the usefulness of an output for the participants themselves or the broader community. Conceptually, creativity entails the generation of novel, useful ideas, and outcomes using imagination on a spectrum of individual and collaborative activity that exceeds collaborative learning (Craft, 2008). In turn, this refers to the construction of assimilating knowledge together based on each other’s ideas and thoughts (Arvaja, 2007). This means a process or output is novel to the surrounding community, not only to the participants. The question of how collaborative creativity and learning could be fostered with digital tools is a current and appealing subject (Ludvigsen & Steier, 2019; Stahl et al., 2014). In the workplace, digital tools can support idea generation and implementation in three ways (Oldham & Silva, 2015): First, employees gain access and exposure to new and diverse information, such as by reading blog posts from other experts, communicating in professional discussion forums, or exposing ideas and products to various audiences. Second, digital tools can improve work engagement by increasing autonomy and interactions with and feedback from other employees. Moreover, employees can use mobile

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devices to work remotely while still receiving collegial support through group chat services (such as WhatsApp). Third, employees can receive socioemotional or instrumental support from others. For example, they can interact with colleagues to receive informal support in addition to encouragement and feedback related to new ideas. We position RealGame as a special kind of digital tool that combines the characteristics of games and simulations (for simulation games, see Sanina et al., 2020). It is a rule-based system where participants manage their simulated company and interact as a team with computer-generated supply and customer markets. Moreover, it illustrates realistic situations for accomplishing various tasks by providing users with control over decision-making functions and by omitting irrelevant or unimportant variables (Lehtinen, 2017). RealGame simulates the management of a manufacturing company, providing a goal-oriented enactment of realworld processes and a shared space for collaboratively creating, sharing, and advancing knowledge (Stahl & Hakkarainen, 2020, p. 11). It also enables iterative experimentation that would otherwise be costly, risky, or even impossible (Sterman, 2011). Thus, it is particularly suitable for fostering the effective learning of complex and dynamic supply chain management-related topics. Further, by being an environment where failures are safe and acceptable, RealGame can stimulate risk-taking propensity, divergent thinking, and flexible mental ability (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al., 2020). In RealGame, teams manage the supply chain of their virtual manufacturing company while attempting to streamline its operations and profitability. Companies operate in common simulated markets and compete for the same resources and customers. Further, teams purchase raw materials from suppliers, manufacture products as efficiently as possible, and sell their end products to customers. Because the objective is to run the company as profitably and efficiently as possible, key indicators (such as sales revenues, margins, and profitability) are provided that can be analyzed both during and after the simulation. Unlike traditional business simulation games, RealGame is conducted in real-time and is clock-driven. Decisions need to be made continuously and in synchronous collaboration among the team. Inventory

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management is a simple example of the need for continuous decisionmaking because manufacturing processes consume raw materials as the simulation clock advances. If the participants do not order raw materials sufficiently in advance (considering possible delivery delays), the company will run out of raw materials and the production process will stop. RealGame includes similar time-dependent decisions in the areas of procurement, production scheduling and shift management, customer deliveries, sales offers, product development, and cash flow management. The context is very dynamic, with different functional decisions affecting other functions and delays in cause-effects. Further, the cause-effect may be indirect, meaning decisions can affect other areas via a third area. Due to this complexity, it is difficult to consider every aspect of managing the company and make decisions simultaneously; hence, effective team collaboration is a crucial aspect of RealGame. In many respects, RealGame represents an authentic, collaborative, digital working environment. Participants can be located anywhere and compete via the Internet. In our case session, all the participants were in geographically disparate locations and it was ensured that no team members knew each other prior to the session. Team members shared the same user interface (see Fig. 8.1), which was used for real-time decisionmaking and operations. Teams could capitalize on computer-mediated communication (Tuhkala & Kärkkäinen, 2018) by utilizing digital tools for scheduling and project management (such as Doodle, Word, and Excel) and by negotiating decisions using synchronous and asynchronous text- and voice-based solutions (such as email, Whatsapp, Teams, and Skype). In RealGame, specific organizational roles for participants are not scripted or pre-scaffolded (Heinonen et al., 2020; Kobbe et al., 2007). Instead, teams are allowed to organize space and starting points for spontaneous collaboration (Stahl, 2010). Hence, we propose that RealGame provides an immersive, safe environment for collaboratively exploring the dynamics of communication and decision-making. Next, we describe how we conducted our study to exemplify and provide evidence on this topic.

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Fig. 8.1 RealGame user interface

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Method The research objective was to examine how collaborative creativity and learning manifest in virtual enterprise simulation game environment? For this purpose, we arranged an experiment where international business school students participated in RealGame session and then wrote reflective essays about their experiences. Before conducting the experiment, we informed the students about the study and asked for consent to use their essays as research material. The international RealGame session consisted of 18 teams of 10–13 participants. The participants were undergraduate students in business studies and came from 10 universities in 7 countries (Belgium, China, Estonia, New Zealand, the United States, Austria, and Finland). The gaming sessions lasted for a total of 14 hours, requiring the teams to work in shifts (which was practical given the geographical dispersion of the participants). Further, it was suggested that each team had at least three team members online at any given time. After the game, the participants submitted their reflective essays. It was requested that the essay would consider topics such as feelings and expectations toward the simulation experience, teamwork and organizing for collaboration, potential conflicts, threats and critical incidents during the team collaboration, collaboration in the virtual context, and challenges experienced during the virtual collaboration. All together, we received 177 essays, amounting to 477 pages. We employed qualitative content analysis approach (Patton, 2015) in an inductive manner for data of student’s reflective essays. The iterative and progressive analysis process consist of several rounds of reading entire data set and proceeding through three main stages: preparation, organization, and reporting (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008). First, in the preparation phase, two researchers combined the reflective essays into batches including all writings of each team. Then researchers read through actively and repeatedly the entire text, 477 pages, while highlighting relevant extracts in the light of research question. In focusing our attention exclusively aim of the study and research question, the unit of meaning selected and defined to be a whole statement. Each unit of meaning was then targeting to capture students’ descriptions of collaborative learning

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and creativity. In the organization phase, relevant extracts were coded, categories created, and abstraction were made. Finally, representative data samples were selected and discussed in light of the research literature and integrated into the research report through a detailed analysis of the outcomes.

Collaborative Creativity and Learning in the Participants’ RealGame Experiences Students found that RealGame was an authentic experience that involved them managing a realistic supply chain of a manufacturing company in teams. Student teams worked in a simulated business context where they were required to make decisions collaboratively. These decisions were related to managing the supply chain of their (simulated) company, including purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, deliveries, and invoicing. Smooth collaboration and communication were particularly appreciated by the teams. There was a consensus among the students that effective collaboration was required for generating useful ideas and for managing the business processes in the game. Moreover, the students found that considering a variety of different aspects was key to a successful decision-making process. The following data extract illustrates how students made business decisions in joint collaboration (Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008) and elaborated on the appropriateness of their decisions (Craft, 2008) by expressing different perspectives, taking into account alternative understandings, and negotiating the best choices for organizational strategies: I have learned from this simulation that it is not necessary to have only one correct choice for the ideas. Different people have different ideas depending on their perspective. Therefore, there could be many solutions for a problem, but to select the best choice; we need to consider many factors and the majority opinions. The simulation also allows me to understand how the real organisations work. It is impossible to

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efficiently manage the organisations without good collaboration in the team.—Sophia (Team 2)

In the game, students appreciated the maintaining of trust between team members. In this respect, they highlighted the importance of a safe environment that provides a fertile soil for open communication and ensures all ideas are regarded as worth sharing. Even though the previous extract highlighted the need to select the best choice among different opinions, some students prioritized discussing different opinions appropriately and respecting different voices: It was important for each individual to take care when sharing opinions to give reasons behind this opinion [so] as not to offend or make anyone feel their ideas were not as good. I believe that the learning experience challenges individuals from different backgrounds to come together to use their diverse opinions and techniques to become a cohesive working team [with an] emphasis on interpersonal relationships, concentrating the role of technology, group interactions, and leadership. Each individual will need to be aware of the different barriers [to] communication, to be able to develop trust with one another, whilst valuing and being respectful of cultural differences.—Zhuang (Team 12)

The accounts of Sophia and Zhuang illustrate the importance of considering different opinions and respecting various voices when making decisions. Accordingly, students commented that the simulated business environment fostered their ability to be open-minded thinkers through multicultural collaboration and communication. Open-minded thinking means being willing to consider alternative ways of thinking by considering one’s own and other’s ideas about an issue. The following extracts show how a student experienced RealGame as an environment for fostering open-minded thinking, which could also be associated with increased collaborative creativity: (---) (the game) provided an international platform to interact with people from many different countries around the world. (---) it enhanced further my capability of being open minded and proactive within a team. From a professional learning point of view, (the game) depicted

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an online version of the real business world that built on networking skills and [taught us] how to respond to the changing market environment in terms of the overall business strategy, production, marketing, procurement, finance and HR.—Sofia (Team 8)

When appreciating differing opinions and open-mindedness, students also emphasized the adoption of a ‘we’ perspective within their teams. Students found that RealGame fostered a continuum in the way their simulated company was managed through shared learning activities and processes, both of which are at the core of collaborative learning. The following student reflection illustrates how students perceived the value of others as a resource, where sharing their own experiences and knowledge was important for attaining mutual goals in their virtual companies: What I really appreciated was that people tried to stop by during the day, watching the simulation and following what was going on. That led to the fact that everybody was kind of informed about what was going on. Furthermore, what I did in particular was that I gave a short introduction to my successor, but also shared my experiences and knowledge that I have already gained with him in order to prepare him with first-hand experiences but also that he can already benefit from my learnings.— Helmer (Team 14)

Sharing their own experiences and knowledge briefly between shifts resulted in successful collaboration if students had joint ideas and thoughts about their goals. The student reflections indicated that RealGame also enhanced the students’ ability to negotiate a joint strategy before the simulation session to ensure they could achieve common goals in the group. The following data extract illustrates how one student perceived technology-mediated communication as a resource for supporting his team in their negotiations and collaborations (despite some technical challenges): Before the simulation we were communicating solely via E-Mail, which was working fine as well. For the simulation itself we only used Skype

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as a communication tool. Concerning the expectations versus the experiences, I honestly thought it would be worse to work within a virtual multicultural team without any [initial] face-to-face meeting. It was a big surprise that everything worked [] well. The biggest challenges [] were the dependence on [] technology, such as the Internet connection, as well as the circumstance that each shift did not know what the others before were deciding, e.g. possible long term strategies. Nevertheless, thinking of the overall situation at the simulation, I found it very exciting to work together with people from around the world only by using virtual tools and I found it quite convenient to work from home.—Mats (Team 17)

The above extract also highlights the central role of creativity in all team activities. Students exhibited flexibility and creativity when crafting workable solutions while appropriating different communication tools and considering both their benefits and constraints. The joint strategy did not pre-empt the need to reconsider team strategies later in the game. Students found that RealGame placed the teams in challenging situations where they had to critically reflect on the actions taken and collaboratively pursue novel ways to proceed. The following excerpt shows how these challenging situations had the potential to eventually become productive collaborative learning situations (cf. productive failure in Kapur & Kinzer, 2009): We constantly ran out of raw materials (---) and we found it difficult to maintain production and make deliveries of sales coming in. This challenge was an important learning factor for the group and once we had realised mistakes that we were making we worked on correcting them.—Marcel (Team 7)

Students recognized that the complexity and versatility of the learning task required participation and collaboration from all team members. RealGame served as a collaborative learning environment that stimulated the students’ creativity by involving them in problem-solving that was similar to the challenges of real work life. Thus, the students were able to benefit from learning the subject content and how to learn (Sunley et al., 2019).

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Collaboration and creativity were interlinked in the problem-solving activities in RealGame, which is illustrated in the following extract: I think from a learning perspective it was very helpful being thrown in the deep end. Although it was challenging, this allowed us to solve problems for ourselves and really work as a team to discuss issues and come up with possible solutions together.—Anna (Team 6)

The ability to frame problems and investigate them is an important work-life competency (Ludvigsen & Steier, 2019). Teamwork in RealGame promoted these abilities and showed the importance of creatively investigating potential solutions to problems. Group creativity and learning transpired from the joint contributions of team members (Sawyer, 2012). Furthermore, the importance and value of team cohesion and mutual participation were highlighted in the team task. The following example illustrates how the simulation not only supports the learning of content knowledge, but also fosters competencies that are needed in computersupported collaborative learning and increasingly in working life: (---) this online simulation definitely surpassed my expectation of how much I would learn. Learning how to compromise, learning how to negotiate, learning how to speak up, learning how to manage, and most importantly, learning how to work as a collaborative team through an online virtual world. (---) Overall, I was not expecting that this online business simulation would be so interesting and fun. I personally feel that I am not only connected with the business simulation itself, but I was also connected with my team members from my university and the team members from other universities.—Karoliina (Team 4)

Next, we summarize the examples provided in this section and discuss how RealGame fostered collaborative learning and creativity.

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Discussion When business students prepare for future work, their professional competencies involve both domain-specific skills, such as managing a company and leading employees as well as more general abilities, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration (Chernikova et al., 2020). When considering domain-specific skills, RealGame considers various nuances of business decision-making, serving as a resource for understanding the logic of how these companies operate in the real world. The students’ reflective essays about their RealGame experiences provided indications of employing various general skills, such as negotiating and adopting shared perspectives, aligning with and accommodating personal views to match others, and working together to attain mutual goals. All these skills were practiced in a completely digital environment, where team interactions were carried out with various digital tools. Practicing domain-specific and general skills moved beyond individual efforts toward collaborative learning. The fact that the teams managed their company in shifts and negotiated a shared vision instead of merely pulling the company in individual directions can, by definition be seen as a requirement for collaborative learning (Dillenbourg, 1999). As the students proceeded with their team tasks, preparing and briefing other team members for the next shift became necessary for success in the game. Hence, the game encouraged the development of a team strategy based on continuous progression rather than every shift simply pursuing their own goals. Mutual construction and the sharing of knowledge are core competencies in collaborative digital work (Hoadley, 2002; Lipponen et al., 2004). In RealGame, participants were only provided with a brief introduction to the simulation (including the functioning of the user interface) instead of detailed instructions about successful management strategies. Hence, the participants needed to experiment with the game, learn the game logic, and anticipate what other teams would do. In a way, the participants collaboratively constructed a mutual universe where the game actions took place. Moreover, because the participant roles in RealGame were not scripted or pre-scaffolded, the teams constructed

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their individual roles within the teams. Technology-intensive working contexts have been found to benefit from sharing or distributing leadership among team members (Charlier et al., 2016; Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014). Further, new insights may emerge when multiple team members assume responsibility for managing and leading collaboration. Collaborative creativity is supported by accessing and exploring new and diverse information, receiving peer support, and being actively engaged at work (Oldham & Silva, 2015). RealGame is about experimenting with different management strategies that might otherwise be too costly or risky to implement in real life. Indeed, the participants elaborated on how they were able to be more open-minded and consider different solutions to the problems that were part of the game. In accordance with current research literature, these examples demonstrate how challenging situations can stimulate collaborative creativity (Sunley et al., 2019). To conclude, RealGame fostered collaborative learning and creativity by providing an environment for practicing both domain-specific and general skills. The game challenged the participants to collaborate effectively, as they needed to make sense of the operational environment, the events taking place in the game, and to organize their teamwork accordingly. The business logic in RealGame has been designed to simulate the causalities and business processes of actual manufacturing companies and their business environments. RealGame, thus represents an authentic context where generic operative decisions and strategies can be applied. However, as the decisions and moves made by other teams in the game affect all teams as well as the (computer-simulated) markets, decisions have varying outcomes. Therefore, teams cannot rely on selecting one best strategy that works in every situation, nor can they anticipate all events in the game and plan their decisions and actions accordingly. In these circumstances, the criticality of collaborative creativity is emphasized. The requirement to collaboratively learn, make sense and create new knowledge in order to creatively solve problems in the game was manifested also in the reflection texts written by the participants. Contemporary work requires versatile skills and competencies, which need to be developed already during education. Learning to creatively and collaboratively solve authentic problems during education prompts

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important work life skills. In their reflection texts, the participants linked their game learning experiences to the skills needed in their future work life. RealGame represents a learning solution that has successfully been applied in higher education to foster the development of collaboration skills and the understanding of business dynamics and operations (Palmunen et al., 2013; Siewiorek et al., 2012). Although this chapter was contextualized to working life, the fact that the participants were students inevitably shifted the focus more toward collaborative learning rather than creativity. Hence, collaborative creativity will be a focal point of interest in our future research. We are currently conducting a project called Well@DigiWork, where we explore RealGame with employees and managers from five large Finnish companies and two health-care districts. We aim at determining whether the gaming sessions stimulate novel ideas that could be implemented in the real working environment. For example, improved strategies could be developed to enable people to manage and cope with the health issues associated with the current conditions that digital work involves.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

9 Mind the Gap: Creative Knowledge Processes Within Interdisciplinary Groups in Organizations and Higher Education Ingunn Johanne Ness

Introduction Creativity and learning have become two popular concepts in the past several decades. Assumed to underlie knowledge-based economies and learning societies (Hargreaves, 2000), they are included in what has become known as twenty-first-century skills (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). These are the skills we expect to be important now and in the future. As a society, we are facing not only changes in how we live but also serious global challenges, many of which will necessitate innovative solutions and a combination of different knowledge and competencies. Innovation occurs at the intersection between disciplines. Learning across disciplines thus becomes crucial. Creativity and learning from one another is important in order to develop new and innovative ideas are such creative knowledge processes are therefore becoming increasingly vital in a variety I. J. Ness (B) University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_9

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of educational settings as well as for those organizations that aim to survive in the aftermath of the current economic crisis. This chapter begins by briefly reviewing how we can understand creativity and knowledge creation before elaborating the concept of polyphony from a sociocultural perspective. This concept has been particularly useful in clarifying the processes connected to creativity and learning, which are known as creative knowledge processes (Ness, 2016). Then, the chapter presents findings from a study that used sociocultural theories as they are suggested by John-Steiner (2000), Sawyer (2003) and Glˇaveanu (2010) where the focus is on the dynamics between the social and the individual; on the dynamic relation between the self and others and, in particular, on the collaboration involved. This chapter elaborates on how interdisciplinary team members learned from one another across disciplinary boundaries and how this stimulated creative knowledge processes and the ability to develop innovative ideas. Moreover, it describes how findings from the specialized researchers in interdisciplinary groups were later transferred to another context: student groups in higher education who are at the beginning of their studies. While organizations and educational institutions belong to different contexts, similarities between them were observed. For instance, both cases involved individuals with different knowledge and perspectives. In both cases, diversity stimulated creativity, which resulted in more learning and even more creativity. However, one condition for succeeding with learning and creativity was crucial in both contexts: “minding the gap” and utilizing the differences constructively by ensuring psychological safety and trust in the groups.

How to Understand Creativity and Learning as Creative Knowledge Processes Creativity is a complex concept that can be defined in many different ways. Since theories on creativity concern what creativity is and how it functions, the emphasis can be placed on either product or process. In a process view, one attempts to understand the how of creativity. Creativity comes from the Latin word creare, which means “to create”. Common

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to the different definitions of creativity is that it involves creating something new. It can be inventing something new or combining known knowledge in new ways. Creativity includes small discoveries and major innovations. The small discoveries are the form of creativity that concerns personal developments and new insights—distinct from the large innovative discoveries at a societal level (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). Anna Craft (2002) used the terms “big C” and “little c” to distinguish between the form of creativity that could change the world and the one that deals with the more mundane small discoveries. Nevertheless, these forms of creativity are relevant in not only organizations, with individuals engaging in daily working tasks, but also schools, where students are to learn new knowledge, and these processes can lead to major innovations. Both creativity and learning is about creating knowledge. The two concepts can be bridged explicitly under the concept “creative knowledge processes” (Ness, 2016; Ness & Søreide, 2014) which refer to knowledge processes that include new ways to understand something for the individual—and/or generate new ideas which were unknown to the group, the domain or society. In this way, creative knowledge processes include both little c and big C. In the next section the chapter will give a very short overview of creativity and knowledge creation before presenting a sociocultural approach to creative knowledge processes which allow us to study creativity and learning as intertwined phenomena.

From individual Creativity to Creativity as a Social Act An overview of creativity studies reveals that the main view of creativity focuses on individual views and traits (Amabile, 1996, 2008; Barron & Harrington, 1981; Feist, 1998), which concern intelligence, personality and other cognitive factors. However, creativity is also a collective phenomenon. Creativity in groups thus began to be investigated more closely. In the collective creativity view, we see that creativity is understood as emerging in social interaction and from collaborative thoughts and conversations. Within this perspective, Grossen (2008) claims that

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creativity can be considered a dialogical process and that conflict and tensions in groups are not necessarily negative. Creativity research has increasingly highlighted the social dynamics that exist between the individual and the social environment the individual belongs to, as well as how interaction stimulates creative processes. Here we find research that focuses specifically on collective creativity and where one observes creativity as distributed. Common to these directions is that they are rooted in sociocultural theory (Henry, 2004; John-Steiner, 2000; Littleton & Miell, 2004; Moran & John-Steiner, 2004; Searle, 2004). Here we also find theories on collaborative creativity, which concerns how two or more individual ideas build on each other in a creative activity. It must be true collaboration which means that as Craft and Wegerif (2006) argue, it must be more than just correspondence between different individuals’ cognitive processes. Both knowledge creation and creativity focus on creating something new and consequently they are a related phenomenon. A collaborative perspective on knowledge creation is often closely connected to learning and research on this has often been conducted in educational psychology-oriented research perspectives and socioculturally oriented research perspectives (Dillenbourg, 2006; Dillenbourg et al., 2009). Educational psychology–oriented research perspectives often has paid attention to how effective different collaboration interventions are for individual learners, while socioculturally oriented research perspectives have drawn attention to group learning and on the social context from which collaboration emerges. Collaboration in a sociocultural approach can be understood as a shared knowledge construction in which it is not enough that participants cumulatively share knowledge together (Mercer, 1996), but where the knowledge construction needs to be jointly built on others’ ideas and thoughts (Mercer, 2010). The aim is that members of collaborative group engage in activities that are not to be merely individual activities, but rather interdependent group processes (for instance interactions). The point is to come to a shared conception of a problem (Bereiter, 2002; Roschelle & Teasley, 1995). According to Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen (2011) these shared processes are mediated by the community and social context in which the group work is occurring

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when looking at them from a sociocultural perspective (Sawyer, 2007; Stahl, 2006). The knowledge-building approach has emerged from cognitive studies of literacy, intentional learning, and creative expertise (Bereiter, 2002; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991, 2003). Studies related to the knowledgebuilding approach (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003) have examined learning as a collective process of production and improvement of ideas. Empirical studies have examined how ideas can trigger inquiry and have sought to understand strategies to assess this type of learning. In some cases, investigation was tailored to discover how online technology can support such processes (Hong, 2011; Zhang & Messina, 2010). Ideas from this approach have been used in the development of the knowledge creation metaphor (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005), which is about how knowledge advancement and learning take place through joint efforts to develop shared knowledge. The knowledge creation metaphor was developed as a way of viewing learning and exploring this process (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005) The idea behind the knowledge creation metaphor is that participation in social activities supports cognitive processes, and it highlights the aspect of collaborative knowledge creation for developing shared objects of activity (Paavola et al., 2004). Furthermore, the knowledge creation metaphor combines two other metaphors1 which are noted in the literature, being the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor (Sfard, 1998). The interaction between individual knowledge and group knowledge has been emphasized by, for instance, Baumard’s model (Baumard, 1999). He continued Nonaka and Takeuchi’s discussion of explicit and tacit knowledge in the process of knowledge creation. According to Zhou and Luo (2012) Baumard’s model can be used to explain group learning. In diverse groups, the basic resources of groups reside in their members. Members participate with knowledge, skills and abilities, and without 1

The acquisition metaphor views learning as a cognitive process. Knowledge is understood as a property of an individual mind, in which learning is a matter of construction, acquisition, and outcomes, which are realized in the process of transfer (Paavola et al., 2004, p. 557). The participation metaphor, by contrast, views learning as a social process. Learning is a matter of participation in practices and actions where knowledge is acquired by social activities. Both metaphors complement each other, rather than contradict, and therefore the knowledge creation metaphor was developed.

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these aspects the group task will not be accomplished (Nijstad & Paulus, 2003). However, in collaborative perspective ideas are seen as developed through collective as well as individual efforts. Through joint engagement ideas are argued over, challenged, and shared as our understanding gets more complex and deep. Such understanding is dialogical and a basically social and collaborative process. Knowledge creation as a collaborative process is also the focus of Tsoukas (2009) which draws on a dialogical view with sensitivity to otherness and awareness on the fact that the categories we communicate with are not created in the individual, but come from dialogues with others. In this way, dialogicality is central in interaction and is the basis for developing new knowledge. These approaches describe different aspects of the interdependence needed for collaborative work and they connect with a sociocultural idea of creative activities as being fundamentally social. Sociocultural research starts from the premise of the interdependence between mind and context and proposes the cultural (symbolic and material, including technological) mediation of human action (Shweder, 1991). From this perspective, creativity and learning are both situated, cultural activities that lead to the generation of new and meaningful perspectives in relation to particular contexts or problems. The fact that creativity and learning feed into each other has been convincingly argued for (Beghetto, 2016) and creative learning stands at the core of what defines human beings as active agents rather than passive recipients of existing cultural content. The next section presents a sociocultural approach to creative knowledge processes. These processes allow us to study creativity and learning as intertwined phenomena

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Polyphony as a Sociocultural Approach to Understanding Creative Knowledge Processes This chapter has a sociocultural perspective on creative knowledge processes. That implies that creative knowledge processes are seen as inherently social, as ideas develop through a combined and relational process of co-construction of meaning and knowledge creation through dialogue. In a sociocultural approach, we are concerned with the social, material and cultural aspects of creativity and knowledge processes. We examine how we learn together and how knowledge is distributed among the group and society as a whole. The term “polyphony” is a complex term that Bakhtin used when analysing the many voices embedded in Dostoevsky’s work. According to Bakhtin, dialogue involves a polyphony of different voices, and he drew parallels to music where polyphony means that the piece is composed for several voices, each with its own melody and where everyone is equal. A true polyphonic work is dialogical (Bakhtin, 1984). This is also relevant for our modern and polyphonic groups in organizations, as well as those in classrooms, where it is a point to activate all the group members’ and students’ different voices so that they can create new thoughts, actions and ways of understanding together. In Bakhtin’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s writing, a polyphonic work is an active and open process. All characters in the novels are allowed to unfold their lives on their own terms. This is also important in interdisciplinary groups, as well as in the classroom, where the teacher’s role as class leader is central when it comes to not only eliciting and exploiting group diversity in learning but also do one’s best to avoid becoming dominant and controlling while stimulating more voices and perspectives among employees and students. For Bakhtin, a contradiction between dialogue and monologue, between the “inner convincing word” and the “authoritarian word”, exists. According to him: the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a

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word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that it is freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. . .[and] this discourse is able to reveal even newer ways to mean. (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 345–346)

This quote describes the “inner convincing word” as open and dynamic. The opposite is the “authoritarian word”, where the monological dominates the interaction and doubt, questions and contradiction have no place because authoritarian definitive answers replace the search for expanded understanding (Dysthe, 2010). As a leader of a group or teacher in the classroom, one wants to avoid being so controlling as to hinder the creative potential of the team members or students. Dialogue is central to the creative aspects of learning. In creative knowledge processes, dialogue and polyphony are connected to the creative and learning sides of knowledge processes.

A Study on Interdisciplinary Groups In a large research study conducted in an organizational setting the main focus was to investigate the creative knowledge processes in interdisciplinary groups working to develop innovative ideas. The unit of analysis was the creative knowledge processes at the group level (i.e. the processes that lead to what the groups themselves understand as innovative ideas). In this study, the main focus was on these processes and how the groups created new ideas by learning from each other. The following overarching research question guided the project: What characterizes creative knowledge processes in interdisciplinary groups working with developing innovative ideas? Qualitative methods were used and the project was primarily explorative (for more, see Ness, 2019). An ethnographic research design was chosen to investigate the research questions as it was necessary to experience the social life of the groups which were studied over longer periods

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in situ. The aim was to obtain detailed descriptions of the creative knowledge processes occurring in the groups, and the empirical material was collected through observations and formal interviews with the groups. The researcher spent time in the groups and could follow closely how the communication and interaction played out. The analyses were inductive yet informed by theory, which implies that some key principles from a sociocultural perspective have informed the investigation and interpretation of the creative knowledge processes.

Three Research Groups in Organizations Organizations that had established interdisciplinary groups who worked towards innovative idea development were contacted. However, it was a challenge to gain access to specific innovative groups in this particular field since innovation is highly business sensitive due to strong competition, which means that researcher access was a potential risk. Three groups were contacted: For more details, see Table 9.1 “Descriptions of groups”. 1. The strategy group: To gain access, the researcher sent an e-mail to a project leader at an innovative energy company, attaching a presentation of her project and detailing what she wanted to investigate. The group needed to be multidisciplinary and their work to comprise some form of idea development. The project leader replied positively and named a project which met the criteria and organized access. 2. The innovation group: The researcher gained access to a second group, based in the Innovation Department. Access here was achieved by contacting senior managers in the organization. The researcher made a case for access by describing the project and noting the possible benefits for the company such as interesting knowledge and better facilitation of future innovative work. This was well received, and the director of the Innovation Department provided contact details for another leader, who facilitated contact with the group leader of a specific project. This project leader invited the researcher to follow the group work and take courses. After passing these, the

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researcher received a key card, which made it possible for her to follow the group over a long period. 3. The research group: To gain access to this group that was based at a Norwegian research institute, the researcher contacted a senior project leader. The plans and criteria for relevant groups were explained and the project leader identified one that was suitable. As with the other groups, group selection and access depended on the project leader.

Results One main result of this project is that the idea development consisted of six phases. The researcher had spent time in the groups and followed closely how the communication and interaction changed during the groups´ idea development work and how the creative knowledge processes had different characteristics at different times. Everything that was said and done in all meetings had been transcribed and enabled the researcher in the analyses also to re-visit the idea development. Thus, once an innovative idea or solution was developed and consolidated, the researcher could track the processes back and in retrospect be able to identify what had characterized the creative processes for that particular idea. Then it was possible to describe the chronological development and characteristics of the creative knowledge processes in each step of the process. (Ness & Søreide, 2014) (Fig. 9.1). The idea development process began with some kind of need or challenge that functioned as a point of departure for the group members’ learning and creative work. First, they went through the initiation phase with understanding the challenge as the main focus. They then began to share knowledge in the knowledge distribution phase and discussed their various perspectives in the polyphony phase. When they managed to learn from one another, they used this new shared knowledge to consider different scenarios and possibilities in the imagination phase, and these gradually transformed into new ideas in the idea formulation phase. The process ended in the consolidation phase with a solution or business case. It was clear that group members learned from one another during the

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Table 9.1 Description of groups Formal group task

Group composition

The strategy group was one of four groups that worked towards the same vision. Results were to be presented for management on a higher level in the organization

Strategy development: They aimed to develop a business case with cost-efficient solutions and a competitive instinct

The innovation group was organized under the research, development and innovation unit. Their mandate included connecting to individuals at the top management level to find high-priority challenges across the organization

Idea/innovation development: They aimed to develop radical ideas based on needs and challenges across the organization

The core group comprised three male members from different parts of the organization with different experiences and competences, including those in legal and on-/offshore logistics and engineering. Group meetings were supplemented with three to 10 members with specific knowledge The core group comprised six (five male and one female) researchers with different expertise and competences, including those in engineering, business, geophysics and cyber technology. In some meetings, the group was supplemented with three to seven members with specific knowledge

Group name

Organization

Strategy group

Innovation group

(continued)

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Table 9.1 (continued) Group name

Organization

Research group

Research institute: The research group is located at an independent research institute with research and related activities in petroleum, new energy and business development

Formal group task

Group composition

They aimed to develop innovative research projects and write applications for external funding

The core group comprised four (three male and one female) researchers with different expertise and competences

first phases of the process, which enabled the development of innovative ideas in the last phases. Group members came from different disciplines and thus had different fields of expertise which enabled them to develop new ways of thinking. During the study, a large amount of data was collected, and detailed descriptions of how the group members experienced the creative processes while working on innovative idea development were achieved. In the focus group interview with the strategy group, members emphasized the importance of learning from one another. Helge, the group leader, expressed how learning from others who knew more enabled them to create something new together: This project was different because here we needed to learn and understand things which are not part of our work on a daily basis. We were developing a strategy about how to work in the future. And in order to achieve this, we needed to learn from others who knew more about the present situation. Then we could use this to create something new together. (Ness & Riese, 2015)

Furthermore, results from the study reveal that creativity peaked in the three middle phases since, in this part of the process, the group members began to discuss and challenge new ideas. It was also obvious that in this particular part of the process, the activities were circular in the sense that

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one could see how the group members moved between the different identified phases while discussing these ideas. Members explored different ideas and scenarios, began to formulate ideas and often failed to complete an idea for various reasons; they then returned to their discussion but with another angle. The three middle phases thus became a separate “room” within the process and were characterized by how many voices confronted one another and how they built on different views. The researcher therefore called this “room” the Room of Opportunity (Ness & Søreide, 2014). One of the most interesting results from the study was how significant it was that the diverse group members were able to learn from one another to use the new knowledge to develop innovative ideas. They engaged in scenario thinking, which was directly stimulated by the existence of multiple perspectives within the group. Nevertheless, if the perspectives were too far apart and the group members could not come to an understanding, the discussion became unproductive as it failed to generate specific ideas. Jacob, one of the members of the strategy group, asserted: If one does not speak the same language, it can be difficult to understand each other, and we know that it is difficult to combine different sets of knowledge. One needs to understand and have something in common. The more different one is, the harder that process will be. (Ness & Riese, 2015)

Each member of the group needed to consider the others’ perspectives, and if this was impossible, other group members endeavoured to negotiate and “translate” the differences to create a shared understanding (Ness & Søreide, 2014). For the learning and idea development to succeed, the group members had to maintain an open mind towards one another. Eric, from the innovation group, stated during an observation: “Okay, in this room we shall forget about traditional structure and differences. I am so happy to see so many competent people gathered here today. So, let’s be open minded and investigate this” (Ness & Riese, 2015).

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Since the group members saw matters differently due to their diverse disciplinary backgrounds, it was crucial that they respected one another and that the group became a safe place. When the group members met at the boundaries of their disciplines, constructive cross-disciplinary collaboration appeared to require trust and an open mind. It was clear that if the group members talked to one another and became familiar with one another, they seemed to gradually become more comfortable, began to understand more of one another’s terminology and could understand what was said. Such discussions and negotiations involved curiosity towards one another’s viewpoints and acknowledging the differences. Eric elaborated this point as follows: We have different competences gathered in one place, so to speak, and there is a huge potential in tossing things back and forth between the different people. This synergy is really good, that we can say what is on our mind – and if someone disagrees, that is okay too. There must be trust in the group so that everybody participates. And also respect and understanding for each other’s special competence is important, I think. Why do we say the things we say? (Ness & Riese, 2015)

If the group members did not trust one another and acknowledge one another’s knowledge, then the group would fail to build on the various perspectives, which then inhibited the creative processes and the chance for innovative ideas to be generated. Curiosity, openness and respect were particularly crucial factors for succeeding in the knowledge development processes (for more, see Ness, 2017; Ness & Riese, 2015). Overall, the results in the project underscore that group members required top specialized knowledge and needed to learn from one another and challenge the existing knowledge in order for the tension between different perspectives to be creative. These results prompted the researcher to wonder whether one could stimulate creative knowledge processes in the student groups by organizing the teaching similarly, using several phases and steps with different activities. Would it be possible to create a creative group dynamic that also involved dialogue, resistance and tension? Could such a polyphonic opportunity room also be created in the seminar groups in higher

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education? Would students understand the importance of having solid knowledge—which, in practical terms, would imply that they had to read and prepare before seminars—in addition to having an explicit focus on the relational conditions? Would the learning objectives be met? Would students practice curious and respectful communication when put into groups? Would the researcher manage to surrender control in the most creative part and let the students unfold freely? Since it seemed to be an exciting project, the researcher decided to test this out with the students (Ness, 2020).

Transferring the Results to Student Groups in Higher Education The organization groups consisted of individuals with different voices in the sense that they had diverse disciplinary backgrounds and expertise. Similarly, in the student groups, different voices arose because the students came from different departments and faculties. Moreover, a similarity between the leader of the organization groups and the teacher for the student groups was observed: both wanted to facilitate active group members/students and stimulate learning and creative knowledge development openly and respectfully. Differences in how individuals view the world encourage creativity. The seminars with the students therefore included a structure that would elicit the students’ different views. A popular activity was dialogue games, where the students sat in small groups (approximatively five per group) and were introduced to various arguments obtained from the course literature. No answers were predetermined, and each student had to agree or disagree and explain to the others in the group how he or she considered a matter. Different parts of the curriculum were examined, and the arguments were formulated in a way that would elicit the students’ different ways of thinking and become explicit. As this created some tension and disagreements in the groups, it was important for the teacher to join each group for a few minutes to grasp what the members were discussing and how they communicated. The point was that all members should be heard and different ideas and perspectives explored. It was therefore

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crucial that the students were provided sufficient time to be creative and “play” with ideas (Dalland & Thaule-Hatt, 2017). The point of these exercises was not necessarily to arrive at one concrete creative “product” but to practice the creative knowledge processes where the individual student experienced “little c”, meaning a change in perspective, to have learned something new. As with the organization groups, one could see how the friction between the different student voices stimulated creative knowledge processes when the students assumed different perspectives. Each student had to argue from a point of view other than his or her usual. In this interaction, students had to feel safe to disagree, and the environment in the class needed to be supportive and respectful (Ness, 2017). It seemed as if the students enjoyed discussing different matters and played with different roles in the groups. One of the students said this: I enjoyed being the challenger the most – I could disagree a lot then...That was a way of using my imagination too you know … Its hard, you know, to be like the one bringing new thoughts. Sometimes I surprised myself too, that I could do that, being the one who opened up a new window

There is a risk involved when moving outside one’s comfort zone, whether one is a student or an employee of an organization. The students needed to practice this over time. and a common student feedback was: “I think we should spend more time on practicing dialogue and collaboration and not only restrict it to one course”. It was, however, essential to have clear instructions on how to communicate. For instance, the students had to listen to one another and attempt to understand what the other students were trying to say instead of considering what to say next. In other words, it was important for them to “mind the gap”—to realize that they were different and therefore had distinct opinions.

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The Importance of Openness, Respect, Psychological Safety, and Trust in the Groups According to Bakhtin (1984, pp. 87–88), ideas are born in dialogical polyphony and further developed in the encounter with other ideas. The employees in the organization groups were told to respect one another, while the students practised formulating their thoughts as questions and not solely as statements and were reminded to be open and respectful to one another. The purpose here was that they should become familiar with one another, gain trust in one another and think together to find new ways of solving a problem that required collaboration. If we build on Bakhtin’s thoughts, then dialogue is central to the creative aspect of learning, and it is important to facilitate the learning processes so that all involved have a say and are heard. Everyone should have the opportunity to actively participate in creating meaning and developing new thoughts. When the teacher in a classroom or a leader in an organization deviates from a dominant role with the “right answer” and wonders along with the students/employees, the students/employees become resources rather than individuals to be taught or trained. As Bakhtin (1981, pp. 345–346) describes, “the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s”. Moreover, according to Bakhtin, the opposite occurs when a teacher or leader acts dominantly, which hinders real dialogue and creative understanding and discourages doubts, questions and counter perceptions. In creativity theory, allowing counter perceptions and discussion is crucial for promoting creativity (Glˇaveanu & Gillespie, 2015). The meeting of different perspectives supports creativity, and the friction that results from these different perspectives is important for the creative knowledge processes. Furthermore, to promote creativity in individuals, whether students or employees, one must provide sufficient time and space for them to explore different issues in dialogue. Such dialogues involve both resistance when disagreeing and challenging each other, at the same time as there is support and an acknowledgement of each other’s opinions. Again, in this interaction, those individuals must feel safe to disagree, and the environment must be supportive and respectful (Ness, 2017). Risk is generally involved when moving outside one’s comfort zone, regardless of

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whether one is a student or an employee of an organization. It is therefore crucial for group members to spend time together, become familiar with one another and feel psychologically safe in the sense that they are unafraid of saying something silly. Through such creative knowledge processes facilitated by trusting psychological safety, small discoveries can arise. Often called “little c”, these are relevant forms of creativity that can, in turn, result in major innovations at the societal level.

Concluding Remarks Learning and creativity are vital to not only organizations but also schools and higher education institutions. This has to do with the fact that we live in a rapidly changing society and being able to learn, to create new knowledge, to combine existing knowledge in new ways, are necessary—also with respect to the global challenges that require not only creative thinking but also very much innovative and interdisciplinary solutions. Learning and creativity are two interrelated phenomena that are bridged under the concept “creative knowledge processes” which involve knowledge processes where we are creating some new insight at an individual level and also the knowledge processes that are innovative and resulting in something new to others and the society. Creative knowledge processes are stimulated by diversity and individuals with different perspectives. However, to succeed with creative knowledge processes requires some underlying conditions. At the individual level it requires openness, curiosity and respect. This is important in order to avoid relational conflicts that can hinder the creative work. In addition, the context is also important—that there is trust and psychological safety. When we are moving outside our “comfort zone”, it is crucial that we trust others around and that we are not afraid of asking “silly” questions. Thus, it is important to “mind the gap” and to be aware of how to utilize the differences by creating an explorative and open climate in the groups. This chapter has presented results from a study on creative knowledge processes in interdisciplinary groups in organizations and described how these results were transferred to another context: student groups

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Room of Opportunity

Initiation

Knowledge distribution

Challenge or Need

Polyphony Shared Knowledge

Imagination

Idea Formulation

Consolidation New Ideas

Solution or Business Case

Fig. 9.1 Model: The room of opportunity (Ness & Søreide, 2014, p. 557)

in higher education. Both cases involved diversity and individuals with different perspectives, which stimulated the creative processes and could lead to more learning and new insights and knowledge for the employees and students. However, one condition for succeeding with learning and creativity was fundamental: “minding the gap” and using the differences constructively by ensuring psychological safety and trust in the groups. The chapter shows that it is important to be aware of certain conditions in order to succeed with creative knowledge processes. If these relational requirements are met, the chance of succeeding with these processes are increased. Further, the chapter shows how such creative knowledge processes can be facilitated throughout six phases, each with specific characteristics. If an organization wants to build an innovative culture, it is necessary to take such a systematic approach to these processes. Innovation does not happen automatically—it needs creativity and learning in the form of creative knowledge processes carefully facilitated at different levels in the organization.

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10 Remaking and Transforming Cultural Practices: Exploring the Co-occurrence of Work, Learning, Innovation Stephen Billett, Silin Yang, Arthur Chia, Jo Fang Tai, Millie Lee, and Sha Alhadad

Introduction Across human history, it seems that much, if not most, work-related innovations have arisen through work activities, in work settings, and by workers (e.g. Gimpel, 1961; Turnbull, 1993). Prior to the relatively S. Billett (B) School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Finland e-mail: [email protected] S. Yang National Trades Union Congress, Marina Bay, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] A. Chia · M. Lee Institute for Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Eunos, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_10

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recent advent of educational programs dedicated to developing occupational capacities in technical and university institutions, and even more recent intentional efforts to promote innovations (e.g. R & D centres), this was the only option for most workers. Even in eras when craft skills were regulated by guilds, individual enterprises developed and jealously guarded their innovation against the corporate powers of those regulators. This process has been described as the centuries-long tradition of innovation by craft workers (Epstein, 2005) that remains relevant today and across a diverse range of occupations (Hoyrup et al., 2012). Once considered, this claim seems defensible given that only in recent times have innovations become associated with labs and development units, and creativity. Up until then, and probably still today, most occupational and workplace innovations are likely to be the product of workers’ innovation and learning (Hoyrup et al., 2012). Consistent with contemporary definitions of creativity, which emphasize identifying and generating a response, this process is a necessary first step in initiating, enacting and monitoring innovations in and through work. Indeed, and importantly, far from all workplace innovations are de novo (i.e. novel, starting anew) or technology-initiated. Many innovations are about adapting and advancing what exists to address emerging needs and workplace requirements (Bailey, 1993). Nevertheless, it requires identifying and accounting for and accommodating local and workplacespecific factors (Hoyrup et al., 2012), that requires an ability to be generative of novel solution (i.e. creativity). Even when the innovations are de novo, they often need to be adapted to the goals and practices of the particular workplace/situation (Billett et al., 2003), thereby emphasizing the situated nature of innovation and innovative practices. Such innovations cannot be merely imported into workplaces J. F. Tai Skillsfuture Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] S. Alhadad Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, Singapore

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and unproblematically implemented. Instead, they require workers to adapt them to specific workplace practices and goals. Indeed, innovations at work are defined as “… the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service) or process, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations” (OECD/Eurostat, 2005, p. 46). Being innovative at work, therefore, is not reserved for scientists, technicians, geeks and start-ups. Indeed, findings from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) suggest that all classes and kinds of workers are frequently engaged in workplace innovations, thereby making the ability to be innovative as a core quality of contemporary work capacities (Billett, 2015). Moreover, it is important to understand that innovations at work are both premised on and contribute to workers’ learning. When responding to activities in the workplace workers apply and extend further what they know, can do and value (i.e. their knowledge) that is a product of their learning across life histories (i.e. ontogenetic development) (Scribner, 1985). This knowing, ability to achieve goals and values comprises their personal epistemologies that informs and underpins their workplace performance (Billett, 2009). Yet, as they engage in these tasks and generate responses to problems they encounter, workers also learn and refine, reinforce and extend what they know, can do, and value through their engagement in these goal-directed activities, in what is referred to micro-genetic development (Scribner, 1985). As longestablished, engagement in goal-directed activities lead to change in what individuals know, can do and value (i.e. learning) (Anderson, 1993; Glaser, 1989; Mayer, 1992). So, whether generating de novo responses or adapting innovations generated elsewhere, learning arises through engaging in goal-directed activities associated with innovations. Therefore, along with changes in work practices and activities, a legacy in terms of changing what individuals know, can do and value (i.e. their learning) also co-occurs. This co-occurrence it follows, needs to be emphasized in both policy and practice. In contemporary schooled societies learning is often and erroneously associated with participation in intentional education activities (i.e. schooling, training, study), and innovations are the result of

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specialist workers and work processes. Whilst this association is noncontroversial for those who understand the processes and outcomes of learning through work, others may fail to comprehend this precept assuming that learning is something that occurs through intentional educational activities, not those of other kinds. Hence, for instance, the frequent use of that most erroneous of terms—informal learning. The precept exercised here, is that that there is a co-occurrence and interdependence between innovation and learning at and through work (Billett, 2012). This co-occurrence is central to both personal and workplace continuity (Hoyrup et al., 2012), as the learning required for responding to new workplace problems is central to workers’ ongoing employability, on the one hand, and to workplaces’ continuity, on the other. That continuity is premised upon their workforce’s capacity to respond productively to changes in the requirements for goods and services they produce. Hence, the prospects for workplace viability through generating and enacting innovations and workers’ learning and employability are richly intertwined. Hence, a personally mediated, but socially constructivist explanation is adopted here. The empirical basis for the case made here is founded on five case studies of learning and innovation in small to medium size enterprises across precision engineering and aged care. This inquiry comprised mapping what factors supported the initiation, enactment and sustaining of workplace innovations through interviews with workers and supervisors in these enterprises and some observations of the workplace activities within them. It is from these five cases that the findings are drawn and advanced here as the basis for understanding the relationship between learning and innovation.

Promoting Innovations and Learning at Work It can be advanced from the premises proposed above that realizing effective alignments between workers’ learning and innovation in workplace settings is central to securing workplace continuity and advancement, and, collectively, national economic and social goals, as well as individuals’ employability and work–life learning. Yet, these premises

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raise questions about how workers’ capacities to respond to new challenges and to innovate can best be developed and utilized in workplace settings for both workers’ ongoing learning and workplace viability. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the two nations whose industries emerged strongest from World War II (i.e. Germany and Japan) enacted approaches to learning and work innovations centred on, at and through processes of production in workplaces during their reconstruction efforts (Sennett, 2008). That is, these approaches combined workers’ learning and generating new ways of working through using and extending occupational capacities. As in these instances, when invited to contribute to their workplaces’ viability and advancement, workers are often able to make positive and essential contributions (Hoyrup et al., 2012; Rowden, 1997). When asked about how they learnt to respond to new workplace tasks and challenges, a broad selection of Australian workers consistently report learning through their work as being the most efficacious and preferred mode of occupational development (Billett et al., 2016). Lifelong education provisions (e.g. taught courses, training programs) were often viewed as being ill-placed to secure the kinds of learning outcomes for particular workplace requirements. This is perhaps not surprising as these educational provisions are often remote from the workplace-specific imperatives and contingencies shaping the need for and enactment of innovations. Yet, unless work–life learning or educational programs can also realize workplace change and innovations, their outcomes may be limited to personal learning legacies (i.e. individual development), but not workplaces practices. Consequently, findings of developing workers’ capacities of these kinds can inform how to progress in supporting the learning required for adaptable and innovative work performance (Barkey & Kralovec, 2005; Dore & Sako, 1989). This goal is crucial in an era where lifelong learning and workplace innovations are being increasingly seen as essentially personal, workplace and national imperatives. Therefore, identifying how workplace innovations and effective work–life learning can best co-occur is an important imperative. This goal can be realized through investigating the processes of workers engaging in everyday work activities and responding to new tasks and challenges, as workers of all kinds and classifications are already routinely engaged in remaking and transforming

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their occupations (Billett et al., 2005). Through aligning learning and innovation, occupational and workplace practices were transformed, by workers’ engagement with and, interdependently, learning of these new tasks; Donald, 1991). It is these kinds of processes we need to know more about and are the focus of the investigation reported and discussed here.

Explanatory Orientation The explanatory orientation adopted here is broadly social constructivist, yet emphasizes the interdependence between personal and social contributions to thinking and acting (Goodnow & Warton, 1991). It holds that both individuals’ personal epistemologies and suggestions from the social world engage interdependently when individuals engaged in thinking and acting, and, hence, learn through goal-directed activities at work (Billett et al., 2016). The social suggestion here comprises the socially generated tasks workers undertake, the problems and other challenges they confront, as well expectations for work performance and how it is judged (i.e. desired outcomes) (Scribner, 1984), that are referred to by Searle (1995) as institutional facts; i.e. they arise through the social world. On the one hand, these include the need to engage with and enact occupational practices and workplaces’ norms and practices. On the other, individuals need to engage with and learn from and through social suggestions such as those projected in and through work activities (Goodnow & Warton, 1991). However, these contributions are interdependent, rather than being antagonistic or oppositional. There is nothing more social than individuals (e.g. workers), whose understandings, practices and values arise through their engagement and negotiation with what is experienced socially, albeit in personally idiosyncratic ways, across their life histories. However, that interdependence includes accounting for both the goals for and processes of learning and innovative work practices being situationally shaped (Billett, 2001a). Innovations cannot just be imparted from outside of workplaces or enacted without accommodating situational factors and requirements. So, rather than fixed guidelines, informed principles and practices are likely needed to accommodate situational factors in assisting workers and their workplaces to

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optimize opportunities for learning and innovation (Howard, 1995). Hence, inquiries are needed to systematically identify workplace practices that effectively support the processes and outcomes of learning and innovations. In sum, the co-occurrence between learning and innovation needs to be explained and advanced by understanding further the relations between personal and social factors. Together, these relations shape both individuals’ development across their life courses, and the remaking and transformation (i.e. innovations) of the culturally-derived practices that comprise occupations through work and in response to specific challenges. To date, much attention has been given to how interpsychological processes (i.e. those between individuals’ contributions and suggestions of social and physical environments) shape individuals’ learning and development. Yet, these analyses rarely address how individuals’ contributions shape continuity and change in the socially-derived norms, forms, and practices, such as work performance through which they learn. So, there are gaps in our understanding of the interdependencies between how social institutions and settings (i.e. workplaces) and practice (i.e. ways of working) (Searle, 1995) change through processes of personal transformations (i.e. learning). This is a fundamental issue for human societies, as securing continuity and respond productively to changes that constantly emerge are essential (Donald, 1991). Investigating and illuminating these changes in socially-derived personally engaged activities, such as workplace innovations offers the basis for understanding further these phenomena.

Investigating How Innovations Are Initiated, Enacted, Supported, and Rewarded in Workplaces To illuminate and elaborate how workers’ learning and capacities cooccur, an investigation was undertaken in five small-to-medium-size private enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore using interviews with workers, and managers/supervisors, as well as observations of these workplaces.

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Singapore was selected as a site for this study as there is a national concern arising from the findings of that nation’s PIAAC survey to improve the innovative practice of its workplaces and Singaporean workers’ abilities to innovate (Ministry of Manpower, 2016). SMEs were selected because learning and innovation are requirements for their viability, they are a central element of the national economy and the scale of these enterprises permit the required research to be undertaken. As innovation goes beyond increasing productivity and includes the quality of services, it was necessary to engage with SMEs in manufacturing and the provision of services. The five enterprises comprised three from the healthcare sector (i.e. Home Care [HC], Residential Care [RC] and Care Home [CH]), and two from advanced manufacturing (i.e. 3D Printing [3D] and Precision Engineering [PE]). Advanced manufacturing has an ongoing requirement to improve products, enhance productivity and engage with new technologies. The service sectors are also required to innovate to respond to changing client or patient needs and find ways of responding in more effective ways. With its ageing population, it is imperative to address the needs of a burgeoning aged care sector in Singapore. The inquiries in each of these SMEs comprised case studies of the workplace and personal practices being enacted and how these practices supported the co-occurrence of learning and innovation. To operationalize the research, rather than using a term like innovation, reference was made to ‘changes’ in the workplace, individuals working practice and the work practices of these enterprises. Using this term allowed us to identify the range and kinds of innovations that occurred in these workplaces, rather than using an exclusive label such as innovations which might not elicit comprehensive responses. The data-gathering processes comprised structured interviews with between three and five workers and their supervisors or managers in each of the five workplaces, using a schedule of questions to inquire about: (i) recent changes in work activities, (ii) how these changes had been initiated, supported and enacted in these workplaces. The interviews included the administering of a survey that was used to identify factors supporting the initiation, enactment, support of and rewards for innovations. The informants were asked to indicate, using Likert scales, the utility of a list of factors that supported the initiation, enactment

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and support for innovations in the workplace. These interviews were also followed, wherever possible, by periods of observation. The interviews were conducted using a structured format to gather data about the worker, the workplace, a range of measures associated with undertaking new tasks and factors shaping how these occurred. Importantly, these data were grounded in instances on workplace innovations by requiring informants to consider specific instances of changes in their workplace and base their responses on them when responding to the questions and scales. By using specific instances of workplace innovations and focusing on actual work activities and interactions in which the informants participated, the data are more likely to be valid than that when there are no specific instances and practices upon which to provide their responses. Also, a set of items fashioned on those in PIAAC survey about: (i) the kinds of discretion workers enjoyed, (ii) the frequency of and kinds of problems solved, and (iii) measures of engagement in and support for learning that are standard items within the survey (Organisation for Economic Co-operational and Development, 2013). So, through the interviews and observations, data were gathered about the processes of initiating and enacting innovations, and the extent of discretion, support and rewards afforded and by whom. A standard scale of importance of each of these factors was used to elicit responses from informants about their relative importance (i.e. Essential, Very important, Important, Not Important, and Irrelevant ) against a standard set of contributions to those processes was also utilized (i.e. Boss/manager, Supervisor, Coworkers, Worker, Government policy, Educational provision), but in some cases, additional factors were included (e.g. Workplace, Customer) as appropriate. The analyses of the data comprise a thematic review of the interview data and its alignment to the specific questions being addressed and the survey data was analysed on the basis of frequency against relative importance of the list of factors shaping the initiation, enactment, support for and rewards for innovations. Accounts of the enactment of specific initiatives provided a key basis for elaborating the findings from the survey. Presented in the tables below and discussed below were based on the responses to the survey that was administered as part of the interview process to ascertain the importance of the listed set of factors, which

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included an option to add additional contributing factors. For instance, in some workplaces, additional factors were identified (e.g. clients and key customers). Interview data and scales that captured measures of the key factors that initiated, permitted engagement in, supported, and rewarded engaging in workplace activities that were innovative. These tables below present aggregated data on Essential and Very important and Not important and Irrelevant to identify patterns in the responses. This aggregation was used to secure a tighter pattern of findings and minimize the impact of differences in informant reaction to the scales. In overview, from the interviews, survey instrument and observations, it was found that factors most associated with initiating, engaging in and rewarding innovative action in these workplaces emphasize those that were close or proximal to these workers. That is, it was the actions of and interactions with supervisors/managers and co-workers and the actions of workers themselves that were central to these processes of learning and workplace innovation, rather than more distant factors such as education provisions and government policies.

Initiating, Enacting, Supporting and Rewarding Innovations Patterns are evident in the data from these five Singaporean SMEs about initiating, enacting, supporting and rewarding innovations and learning. In the tables presented below the importance of actors in initiating (Table 10.1), enacting (Table 10.2), supporting (Table 10.3) and rewarding for innovations in these workplaces (Table 10.4). The analysis is founded on premises associated with both innovation and learning, as these two processes are held to be interdependent and co-occurring. As foreshadowed, there is no distinction between thinking and acting, and learning, and actions such as initiating and enacting innovations are generative of learning (Anderson, 1993; Greeno & Simon, 1988), particularly higher orders of procedures and linking of conceptions. Therefore, not only is there interest in what supports and sustains initiating and enacting of innovations in the workplace, but also about the learning required for and realized through initiating and enacting those innovations.

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Table 10.1

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Who or what was important in initiating workplace innovations Not Essential/ important/ very important Important irrelevant

Boss/manager Supervisor Co-workers Worker Government policy Educational provision Customer Workplace

3D, RC, RC, 3D,

RC, CH, PE CH, PE PE RC, CH, HC, PE

3D 3D, CH

HC HC HC

RC, CH

HC, 3D, PE

3D, RC, CH, PE

HC

3D, PE HC

Note HC = Home Care; 3D = 3D Printing; RC = Residential Care; CH = Care Home; PE = Precision Engineering

Table 10.2 Who or what was important in engaging in innovations in the workplace Essential/ very important Boss/manager Supervisor Co-workers Worker Government policy Educational provision Customer Client/Patient & family

3D, CH RC, CH, 3D, PE RC, 3D, CH, PE HC, 3D, RC, CH, PE RC PE HC

Important

Not important/ irrelevant

RC

HC, PE HC HC

CH 3D, CH

HC, RC, 3D HC, PE

Note HC = Home Care; 3D = 3D Printing; RC = Residential Care; CH = Care Home; PE = Precision Engineering

Ways of understanding these data and illuminating the co-occurrence between work and learning are premised upon bases of affordances and engagement (Billett, 2001b). Affordances are those associated with what is provided, offered or made available to individuals (i.e. workers) as innovators and learners, on the one hand, and how individuals come to engage with what has been afforded them. In this instance, within these SMEs are the affordances are those provided by the Boss/manager, Supervisors, and Co-workers and outside of those workplaces are the provision

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Table 10.3 Who or what was important in supporting innovations in the workplace Essential/ very important Boss/manager Supervisor Co-workers Worker Government policy Educational provision Client/patient satisfaction & well-being

3D, RC, CH, PE RC, CH, 3D, PE RC, 3D HC, 3D, RC, CH, PE

Important

Not important/ irrelevant

CH, PE

HC HC HC

3D, RC

HC, PE

3D, CH, PE

HC

HC

Note HC = Home Care; 3D = 3D Printing; RC = Residential Care; CH = Care Home; PE = Precision Engineering

Table 10.4 Who or what was important in rewarding innovations in the workplace Essential/ very important Boss/manager Supervisor Co-workers Worker Government policy Educational provision Client/Patient & family Profession Society at large

3D, RC, CH, PE RC, CH, PE 3D

Important HC HC, 3D CH HC, CH, PE CH

Not important/ irrelevant

HC, 3D, RC, PE RC HC, 3D, RC, PE HC, 3D, RC, CH, PE

HC HC HC

Note HC = Home Care; 3D = 3D Printing; RC = Residential Care; CH = Care Home; PE = Precision Engineering

of educational opportunities and government policy. The engagement is that by which workers participate in these activities. Hence, through using grounded instances of work activities it is possible to identify the importance of factors that support or inhibit opportunities to workers (i.e. affordances) and those associated with individual engagement associated with initiating and enacting innovations at work, through which they also learn.

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Initiating Workplace Innovations As proposed above, through engaging in such activities such non-routine tasks and problem-solving are generative of rich learning (Anderson, 1993). However, the scope of and opportunity for such innovations is subject to situational work requirements and factors. For instance, in some workplaces, it might be necessary for all innovations to be strictly controlled because of practice-related (e.g. quality control, patient safety, financial accountability), whereas in others the contributions of all workers to initiate innovations are encouraged and supported. There are also issues about the extent that the work practices either encourage or inhibit workers discretion and agency, which are contingent factors. So, it is important to gauge from these SMEs how workplace innovations are initiated. In Table 10.1, the data presented indicate the importance of factors initiating workplace initiatives (i.e. Bosses/managers, Supervisor, Co-workers, Workers, Government policy, and Education provision) across the five SMEs, are indicated in the left-hand column. Then, to the right are columns indicating the aggregations of where informants in each of the enterprises report these factors as being Essential/Very important, Important and Not important/Irrelevant are presented. From the aggregations presented in Table 10.1, it evident that the actions of workers are reported as being the most salient factors for initiating innovations in all five SMEs. The next most frequent factors are the managers, followed by supervisors, followed by co-workers and customers. In one healthcare SME (i.e. HC), worker discretion is at its highest, with other factors such as managers, supervisors and coworkers seen as being not important or irrelevant. This work entails home-based care of older Singaporeans with these healthcare workers employees working independently when visiting clients in their homes. Hence, much of their work is not directly supervised and these healthcare workers must independently generate responses to work challenges they encounter when working with their clients in their homes. Hence, their everyday practice is conducted in relative social isolation from supervisors and managers. Educational provisions are reported as being important in four instances and government policy in two, with this factor being the one that is reported as being least important.

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It is noteworthy that in both advanced manufacturing and healthcare sectors, workers initiating innovations is seen to be of a high order and it is the SME providing homecare where worker discretion is strongly reported. It might be anticipated that the two healthcare sectors would have more limited discretion, because of concerns about patient care. However, apart from HC there is no noteworthy difference, perhaps because it is age care and issues of patient acuity are seen as low. Affordances, as noted, refer to the invitational qualities of the social setting in which activities and interactions occur. These can be, by degree, either inhibiting or supporting the activities of worker-learners. What is suggested by these data is that for initiating workplace innovations, it is important that the support of managers and supervisors is afforded, but most important is workers’ engagement. So, whereas those affordances are reported necessary for the initiation of such innovations in response to workplace problems and challenges, it is essential that workers are permitted the discretion to realize them in that enterprise. An affordance that was less important in these five SMEs is the support of co-workers. As can be seen in these tables, the presence or otherwise of co-workers was less central to individuals’ initiating innovations at work. For instance, aged care workers, due to the isolated nature of their work, did not have many opportunities to exchange ideas or interact with co-workers. Some workers in Home Care were reported to have formed a chat group to provide a form of close support for these socially isolated workers. However, because of ethical consideration of clients, the chat groups had to be discontinued. This circumstance greatly diminished opportunities for the Home Care employees to seek and secure advice from co-workers when they faced challenges in taking care of the clients in their homes. This was an important means of mediating their learning as these workers reported having to address novel tasks and challenges including negotiating with family members. For instance, a female caregiver reported needing to constantly create new activities and exercises (additional to her routine tasks of bathing and feeding) to keep her client engaged and active, as she believes that client care is not just about bathing and feeding, but also about meeting their emotional and physical needs. One male home care worker reported innovating a “home bath” to bathe his client as the home is not equipped with the same facilities as the

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hospital. Routinely, in the 3D printing organization, workers reported being given much autonomy to make decisions on how best to do their work, as reported by the female engineer who added that her manager was ready to offer assistance whenever needed. The access to and availability of this kind of assistance was also referred to by her male colleague who explained that workers are given a lot of autonomy and allowed to work independently, and “… try novel or innovative solutions, as long as the problem gets resolved. They are also able to make suggestions to the management.” So, the nature of the work and workplace practices afforded different kinds of opportunities for engagement, interactions and discretion associated with initiating workplace innovations. As represented here, workers’ engagement in initiating innovations is an important premise for both the innovations and workers’ learning. This finding suggests that the agency, intentionality, and interest of these workers is central to the initiation of workplace innovations. What can be imputed here is that as these workers go about their tasks, they come across circumstances requiring them to respond and sometimes provide novel responses to problems they encounter (Hoyrup et al., 2012). In Residential Care, workers reported that many inventions staff propose is a product of the “very high level of compassion” required for this work. Examples of this included one of the nursing staff tracing a family member to another nursing home and then helping them do a video conference using an iPad. In another instance, a resident with dementia who had formerly been a cleaner was demonstrating difficult behaviours to the extent that she was being constrained by physical and chemical means. However, the care staff experimented by giving her cleaning work to do and even printed paper money which improved her condition and reduced the need for restraints. The openness for and ability to initiate workplace innovations is both a key measure and an enabler of rich work-related learning. Identifying workplaces issues that require novel responses and engaging in the process of considering possible options for what is likely to be effective, positions workers to engage in novel problem-solving, requiring consideration of various causal factors and outcomes. That is evaluating the options that generate responses (i.e. innovations) and appraising their

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likelihood of success. All of these are the kinds of higher-order activities that are generative of strategic procedural thinking and deepen understanding of occupational practice (Evans & Butler, 1992). What is suggested here is that the complex of factors associated with initiating innovations at work is found in the interactions amongst workers, co-workers and supervisors. Underpinning these interactions are the kinds of relations, trust and discretion that affords the opportunity and promotes engagement in both learning and innovation at work.

Enacting Workplace Innovations Providing or having work environments that promote opportunities for workplace innovations may well lead to effective and sustained practices and products that respond to changing requirements and customer needs (Hoyrup et al., 2012; Wegener, 2017). This is the kind of work environment that governments, including the Singaporean government (Economic Strategies Committee, 2010), are seeking to promote and comprise the adoption of work practices that respond to new challenges and changing circumstances (Commonwealth of Australia, 2018; Deloitte, 2016). For these SME in both healthcare and advanced engineering sectors, responding to new challenges is central to their viability. Whether it is addressing the needs of residents or customer demands for new products, there is a need for enacting innovations in these workplaces. As proposed above, the kind of workplace environment that affords opportunities for innovations is most likely to be effective in securing positive outcomes in responding to new challenges and necessary changes through innovations to work practices. One measure of a work environment that provides opportunities for innovations is the degree to which there are opportunities for engaging in such actions. That is, an environment open and supportive of innovations and innovative practices (Rowden, 2002). Of course, there can be work environments that are highly constrained, but still promote innovative practices. A lot of this is referred to as ‘workarounds’, that is, practices that workers invent and enact to secure required outcomes. For instance, Darrah’s classic

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study of production workers in Silicon Valley (Darrah, 1996) indicated that although granted little discretion or provided with rewards for their performance, these workers had to continually innovate to achieve their production goals. That is, they routinely engaged in processes of problem-solving and adapting what was available to them to achieve the required outcomes. It was only through a detailed inquiry that illuminated their work practices that this was realized, as were some limitations of their problem-solving strategies, because they did not possess some understandings and procedural skills to optimally use the available workplace resources. The data on enacting innovations in these five workplaces indicate that the emphasis on workers is even stronger than those associated with initiating innovations, although the opportunities to do so were mediated by workplace supervisors. In Table 10.2, the data indicates the importance of factors enacting workplace initiatives (i.e. Bosses/managers, Supervisor, Co-workers, Workers, Government policy, and Education provision) across the five SMEs, are indicated in the left-hand column. Then, to the right are columns indicating the aggregations of where informants in each of the enterprises report these factors as being Essential/Very important, Important and Not important/Irrelevant are presented. In this table, the patterning of the data indicates that in these five SMEs the most essential factor in engaging innovations is workers themselves, followed by co-workers. Overall, except for Home Care with its particular mode of operation, the opportunities for workplace innovations are founded managers’ and supervisors’ actions. The provision of opportunities is a central basis to understand workplaces as environments that promote the concurrence of learning and innovation. These data indicate a key role for managers and supervisors to enable both learning and innovation. On the one hand, if workplace managers and supervisors provide opportunities, this then can lead to rich and effective learning environments. If, on the other hand, these opportunities are absent or rarely exercised, then the workplace is likely to be limited as an environment promoting learning and innovation (Billett, 2001b). In terms of factors shaping the enactment of innovations, issues of proximity again stand out. It is workers, including co-workers, who are reported as being most central to the engagement in innovations, and

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also supervisors who are close by with managers reported as to have less importance in engaging in innovations in the workplace. Noteworthy, in two work settings, it is customers and clients who are also seen to be influential in terms of engaging in innovations. In the case of Home Care, this is a product of interaction with clients in their homes. Precision Engineering has a small number of clients, consequently addressing their needs is a key imperative for its ongoing viability and sustainability. From these data, it seems that proximal and situational factors are central to workers engaging in innovation practices in these five workplaces. These situational requirements need to respond, and resources to do so are key factors in the degree by which engaging in innovations in the workplace progress in these workplaces. It is perhaps here that the engagement with co-workers is the strongest. That is, enacting innovations in these five SMEs is a circumstance in which workers collectively appeared to engage in realizing these innovations. It is noteworthy that factors distant from these workplaces, such as education provisions and government policy, are again reported as being less important. Instead, it is proximal factors (i.e. those within the workplaces) that shape the opportunity for initiating workplace innovations. The reported exception is a healthcare facility, whose practices might be shaped by government regulation. As with the initiation of innovations, opportunities for enacting them are reported as being mediated by supervisors and managers in some, if not all these five SMEs. Consequently, this provides a clear basis for identifying how more and greater opportunities for realizing the concurrence between learning and innovation in and through workplaces. Workers’ orientations towards innovation and learning play a key role. For instance, a male employee of 3D printing was attending external courses outside working hours on his own accord to increase his knowledge in the field. He viewed this as being a worthwhile investment of time and money: … at that time people questioned the benefits of attending the course. But I tell him since I am in the 3D printing industry, and I have the free time, might as well learn more. you are in 3D printing industry. I

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might not learn the most useful, but at least I learn something … I did something different.

In this way, it was the exercise of personal interest that motivated him to engage in this way. The performances are also associated with enacting opportunities for innovations are largely premised upon how the managers and supervisors in these SMEs elected to engage in the role of exercising and extending those opportunities to workers. So, it is proximal factors and actors largely that mediate opportunities for engaging in innovations. One affordance that was quite weak here is the role of co-workers which was not reported as being important in initiating opportunities for innovations. This emphasizes the centrality of managers and supervisors in shaping invitations to engage in innovations in and through work. In sum, factors that are proximal to the activities and interactions by workers are again seen as the key mediating factors for the enactment of innovations in the workplace. The following section, importantly, focuses on how innovations are supported in these workplaces, and as a result, workers’ learning through them.

Supporting Innovations in the Workplace As they comprise new practices, for innovations to be advanced, accepted, adopted, and become workplace norms, support for them in the workplace is likely to be essential. In representing who or what supports innovations in the workplace, the data presented in Table 10.3 offer a similar pattern to those associated with the provision of opportunities. In this table, the data presented indicate the importance of factors supporting workplace initiatives (i.e. Bosses/managers, Supervisor, Coworkers, Workers, Government policy, and Education provision) across the five SMEs, are indicated in the left-hand column. Then, to the right are columns indicating the aggregations of where informants in each of the enterprises report these factors as being Essential/Very important, Important and Not important/Irrelevant are presented. Except for Home Care, managers and supervisors are reported as being essential for

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supporting workplace innovations. The data suggest that workers themselves are also held to be central to whether innovations are supported or not, whereas co-workers are seen to be less important. Factors that are remote from the site of work (i.e. government policy in educational provisions) are seen to be important, but at a lower level than those close to the actual circumstances of practice. Noteworthy here is that the informants from HC have included their clients as an essential factor in terms of support for innovations. In the kind of negotiated work they conduct, their clients’ and sometimes family members assent is essential. So, factors influencing actions and activities locally are reported as important in these work settings. Yet, as noted in considerations of initiating innovations, the most frequently reported factor is the engagement by workers themselves. In terms of support for innovations in these five workplaces, the patterns here again indicate that localized factors play key roles in supporting the enactment of innovations i.e. managers, supervisors, coworkers and workers themselves. These findings emphasize that support for innovations, and likely learning, are very much grounded in the circumstances of practice and meeting the kinds of imperatives arising in these enterprises and are relevant to their continuity and advancement. The data also indicate the degree by which the engagement by workers in SMEs is important for supporting workplace initiatives. They are central to the degree by which these initiatives are enacted and sustained in the workplace; it would seem. For instance, co-workers’ roles were inconsistent across the five SMEs and appeared to be shaped by the particular workplace’s culture of practice: i.e. the degree by which co-working, co-decision-making, and sharing in innovations were encouraged and supported. Again here, the support afforded by co-workers was not particularly strong or consistent across these five SMEs.

Rewards for Innovation Finally, it is also useful to identify how rewards for innovation at work are distributed and by whom. The patterning of the data presented in Table 10.4 indicates the importance of factors rewarding workplace initiatives

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(i.e. Bosses/managers, Supervisor, Co-workers, Workers, Government policy, and Education provision) across the five SMEs, are indicated in the left-hand column. Then, to the right are columns indicating the aggregations of where informants in each of the enterprises report these factors as being Essential/Very important, Important and Not important/Irrelevant are presented. This indicates that except for HC, managers and supervisors are again essential in the provision of rewards for innovation in these five workplaces. In HC with its high level of autonomous work practices, even here, managers and supervisors are not reported as being important. Factors that are distant (i.e. government policy, educational provisions) are again reported as not being important, and the same goes for co-workers to a lesser degree. There is evidence that, in the case of HC, those whom the service provision directly impacts on clients are central to rewards. The data indicate that managers and supervisors are central to the provision of workplace rewards, and almost to the exclusion of other factors. The key exception is in Precision Engineering where rewards come from working directly with its limited number of specific clients. Noteworthy here is that factors that are remote from the circumstances of practice appear to have little importance with rewards for innovations. That is, factors outside the workplace are viewed as not being particularly important or irrelevant, when compared with what has been afforded within the workplace and how individuals are invited to initiate innovations and then enact them and be supported and then rewarded when doing so.

Work and Innovation: Discussion From this study of innovations and learning in these five enterprises, it was found that the combination of proximal factors, on the one hand, and workers’ engagement, on the other, represent the interdependence between individual workers and the discretion and support provided by the workplace is central to effective co-occurrence of learning and innovation in these 5 SMEs. To conclude, these two factors are now discussed.

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Importance of Workers’ Engagement On all of the measures associated with initiating, engaging, and supporting innovations in these five SMEs, the data indicate the importance of workers and co-workers’ participation. That is, it is those undertaking the work tasks, bringing about innovations, and supporting their enactment who are central to innovations and innovative practices in these five SMEs. Although the ability for these workers to be innovative in this way differs across these SMEs, the evidence across three of the key measures indicates that the central agent is workers themselves. Managers and supervisors were central to the distribution of opportunities and rewards that afforded opportunities for initiating and enacting innovations. But, most centrally here are the actions of workers (i.e. workers and co-workers). Hence, this says much about the importance of positioning workers centrally in innovations at work. Some variations in the degree of discretion and exercise in innovation were associated with enterprise-specific kinds of practices. For instance, in HC where the health workers work in relative social isolation in their clients’ homes, the reach and control of managers and supervisors is inevitably weakened, and the agency and worker discretion is reciprocally increased. Their work requires them to respond to clients’ particular needs in ways that are quite specific to their home circumstances (e.g. physical and social setting). In this form of work, high levels of discretion in the ability to exercise innovation is strong. Yet, elsewhere in the healthcare sector, workers are less able to exercise discretion because of the norms and practices of the institutions in which they are employed and subject to supervision requirements.

Proximity to Managers and Workers A key finding arising from this analysis is the degree by which discretion is shaped by being in a large or small size enterprise. It is sometimes said that SMEs are not small, large enterprises. That is, they have different configuration, organization, and decision-making processes than larger organizations. Yet, what is evident in this study is that the proximal

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nature of bosses, who might also be owners, supervisors and workers, may lead to particular kinds of discretion. These may not necessarily lead to higher levels of work discretion and autonomy when engaging in activities such as innovation. It is noteworthy that in people-intense working environments such as the three healthcare settings, managers and supervisors are being most central to initiating, enacting, supporting and rewarding innovation. These examples seem more intensely focused on the actions of workplace hierarchies than the advanced manufacturing ones. This may also be a product of having hierarchical arrangements associated with the care of aged or sick. However, confounding this prospect is the workers from Home Care who work with greater autonomy in clients’ own homes. That is, they are not under the direct supervision and control of others in the workplace. In sum, the findings indicate that (a) workers as active and directed agents are central to the initiation of innovations in these SMEs; (b) managers and supervisors are central to the provision of opportunities for innovations in these SMEs; (c) an emphasis on the support for innovation in the workplace was from immediate and local actors (i.e. supervisors, co-workers, workers); and (d) engaging in innovations in the workplace is as much premised upon workers (i.e. workers themselves and co-workers) and rewards for innovations in the workplace are reported as being largely exercised by managers and supervisors. The implications from this small study are that, ultimately, it is factors within the workplaces themselves that are likely to be the key source of shaping the opportunities for, engagement in, and support for innovations and learning through them in these kinds of workplaces. Whilst governments sometimes seek to bring about change externally, here it is suggested that policy and practices to bring about change need to focus on and centre their efforts within workplace settings. It is proximal factors such as workplace practices and bases by which workers are engaged that are central to the co-occurrence of both learning and innovations.

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11 Supporting Creativity and Learning at Work: Practices and Structures from Growth Companies Kaija Collin, Soila Lemmetty, Panu Forsman, ˘ Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Tommi Auvinen, Elina Riivari, Sara Keronen, and Marianne Jaakkola

Introduction The links between creativity and learning have increasingly attracted the interest of organisational and working life scholars. The reason for this is the growing need for continuous learning and creative activity in the workplace, as well as the need to find new ways to support learning The original version of this chapter was revised: Second affiliation has been included for the author (Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu). The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_12

K. Collin (B) · S. Lemmetty · S. Keronen · M. Jaakkola Department of Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] S. Lemmetty e-mail: [email protected] S. Keronen e-mail: [email protected] M. Jaakkola e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_11

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and creativity in contemporary working life. Key features such as intensified competition and prevailing and constant change—also seen in the continuous development and implementation of new technologies— create new kinds of learning requirements for organisations and their employees. When reflecting on key learning theories from behaviourism and cognitivism to constructivist approaches, it becomes clear that the latter has had a huge impact on how knowledge and learning are defined (e.g. Ertmer & Newby, 1999/2013; Loyens & Gijbels, 2008; Tynjälä, 1999) and even how creativity is discovered. For example, as Craft (2005, p. 53) notes, ‘It seems that “creativity” and “learning” are not distinguishable if we take a constructivist approach to learning, unless we take a harder line on what counts as “original” and “of value”’. It is important to acknowledge whether learning is addressed through the traditional lens of knowledge transmission or considered to be a more active and subjective knowledge construction process. To cope with contemporary demands, the best possible practices and structures found in organisations need to be distilled. Recent research has found that creativity and learning are strongly intertwined, especially in the context of everyday work and in problem-solving situations (e.g. P. Forsman Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] V. P. Gl˘aveanu Department of Psychology and Counselling, Webster University Geneva, Bellevue, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway T. Auvinen · E. Riivari · M. Jaakkola Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] E. Riivari e-mail: [email protected]

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Collin et al., 2017; Lemmetty & Collin, 2020). Obviously, depending on one’s standpoint, learning is an essential prerequisite for creativity or vice versa. Creativity produces a new understanding and knowledge of a subject (Anderson et al., 2014; Ford, 1996) and can be reconceptualised as a knowledge construction and reconstruction process required by contemporary professional life (e.g. Tynjälä, 1999). Because both phenomena, creativity and learning, emerge as a part of fast-paced and constantly changing everyday work environments, the availability of individual formal training, courses or qualifications is no longer enough to support employees’ daily creative activity and learning. Instead, all activities in the workplace, including leadership and human resource management (HRM) practices, can affect the possibilities for creativity and learning in an organisational context (e.g. Loewemberger, 2013), creating the need for more holistic and overarching understandings. HRM, as well as human resources development (HRD), could play an important part in supporting and facilitating creativity and learning in the workplace. Human resources (HR) are an asset, and HRM is an integral part of all organisational activities, not a separate unit but rather a holistic aspect of management that is strongly connected to and reflective of an organisation’s overall strategy (Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015). As an activity that involves several actors in the organisation, HRM is linked to structures, management and supervisory practices (Bredin, 2006; Jimenez-Jimenez & Sanz-Valle, 2012; Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015). Consequently, HRM is also the ideal starting point for supporting employees’ creativity and learning at work. Although HRM is now increasingly seen as part of the operation of an entire organisation, there is still a lack of knowledge of its various dimensions, particularly as a promoter of creativity and learning. Its practices and solutions can also be assumed to include and reflect wider theoretical understandings of and connections with learning and creativity. The Human Resources Management Supporting Creativity and Learning in Finnish Growth Companies (HeRMo) project (2018–2020) explored the relationships between HRM, creativity and learning in Finnish organisations. The project employed mixed data collection and analysis methods (e.g. Hall & Howard, 2008; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010) with a wider ethnographic research approach. Both quantitative and qualitative tools and methods were utilised at different stages of data

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collection. The main data collection tools included surveys, interviews and observations. The aims of this research (a) examine how creativity and learning emerge in growth companies, (b) identify the types of HRM structures and practices within growth companies, and (c) understand which HRM structures and practices support or restrict creativity and learning at work. Here, we will summarise, in a meta-analytical manner, and discuss the findings of the four studies of the HeRMo project (Collin et al., 2020, 2021; Lemmetty et al., 2020; Riivari et al., forthcoming). In this chapter, we start by briefly describing the theoretical premises behind the research project. Then we present, in more detail, the aims of the project and the research questions of each sub-study. Furthermore, we describe the project methodology, data and analysis methods and summarise the main findings of the studies. Finally, we present our four main conclusions drawn from the HeRMo project and offer insights for future research and practical interventions aimed at supporting today’s working life and the future in the case of individuals, teams and organisations in Finland and beyond.

Creativity and Learning in Working Life In recent years, creativity research has increasingly moved from an individual perspective to the approach of creativity as a collective and sociocultural phenomenon (e.g. Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2010; Gl˘aveanu, 2015). At the same time, constructivism has been established as the dominant educational theory embraced, one way or another, in almost all educational reforms (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). In the shift within creativity studies, it is essential that creative processes and productions are seen as the outcomes of the actions of several people. Practically, it has been stated that creativity emerges in interaction (Hunter et al., 2008)—that is, creations do not emerge in a vacuum but in a social, situational context where individuals construct their creations from culturally connected entities and properties. In educational theory, this simultaneous change has led to introducing active subjects and metaphors of knowledge construction and reconstruction, and while cognitivist approaches already included these undertones, there are significant differences. For example, the emphasis placed on

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metacognitive and self-regulative skills, the stated need to use and transform acquired knowledge and the transformation of education’s aim from the presentation of information to guiding and facilitating learning processes (e.g. Tynjälä, 1999). While individual approaches have addressed, for example, the creative personality and the case of eminent innovators, current lines of enquiry follow, and increasingly acknowledge, the idea that human creativity emerges from the interactions of inherently connected individuals and their surroundings. Even in ‘solitude’, we are connected to the world through our past, surroundings artefacts and our imagination (e.g. Gl˘aveanu et al., 2020; Hunter et al., 2008; Robinson, 2011; Taylor, 1985). Collective creativity, as we understand it in this study, is more than individual creativity in teams (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2001); it highlights creative behaviour that occurs when people interact and cooperate with each other (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). Common criteria for creativity include at least novelty and value (Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Thus, creativity usually refers to processes or outcomes that contain something new, compared to what exists. This may refer to different solutions to a problem at hand (John-Steiner, 2000; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007; Sawyer, 2004) or simply a different perspective being taken. Thus, novelty and value can be complemented with aspects focusing on usability and/or quality of the outcome when evaluating emerging creativity (Amabile, 1996; Runco & Jaeger, 2012). Additionally, surprise (Boden, 2004) and nonobviousness (Simonton, 2012) have been used to address absurd and silly ideas that broaden the scope of creativity (see, for example, Cropley & Cropley, 2010). A sociocultural approach includes a point where external evaluators from the field or domain addressing and evaluating creativity as procedures, ideas and products that differ from those developed before act as gatekeepers (Csikszentmihályi, 1996), setting an example of power relations connecting questions of what is and to whom things need to be novel and valuable. As a process, creativity is often linked to work that connects problemsolving and development (Collin et al., 2017; Lemmetty & Collin, 2020), as well as idea generation (e.g. Mumford et al., 2012). Also, when learning is addressed as active knowledge construction instead of

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traditional knowledge transmission, both creativity and learning become much more mundane and reflect in ordinary everyday practices and structures. Thus, in the current project, we see creativity manifested in employees’ learning and practices, ranging from simple and concrete problem-solving tasks to more abstract developments, adaptations and changes. The practices of creating can be individual or collective, depending on the situation in which creativity is actualised. These divisions are not dichotomic, as an individual’s embodied and embedded existence makes them inherently connected with the surrounding society. This means that individual/personal and social answers to the question ‘For whom do things need to be novel and valuable?’ are considered practical indicators that affect the perspective individuals take when deciding what is creative. For example, Runco and Beghetto (2019) propose the differentiation of primary to secondary creativity, where novelty and value are considered in a narrow individual perspective or broad social perspectives. While we believe that creativity is an important requirement for the accomplishment of high-quality outcomes and the empowerment of employees, we need to acknowledge the ‘lower’ everyday levels where creativity appears to connect with basic knowledge construction and reconstruction processes also labelled as learning. When creativity is accomplished in everyday work, it has been strongly linked with informal learning (see, for example, Marsick & Watkins, 1990). Informal learning can be understood as a part of learning that expands formal learning, training and development and that emerges and results from everyday cognitive activities, such as reflection and metacognitive considerations practised in real-life contexts (e.g. Noe et al., 2014). In addition, while some previous studies have shown that creativity is linked to employees’ existing knowledge and competence (Amabile, 1996; Ford, 1996; Runco, 2015) and workplace learning (Lemmetty & Collin, 2019, 2020), the constructivist paradigm would advance the idea that the reference point for the evaluation of novelty is represented by the broader knowledge structures used to construct or reconstruct something new. Conversely, value would be situationally determined. For example, in nonroutine, knowledge-based work requiring continuous problem-solving (Sanders et al., 2017) and knowledge propagation

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(Beach, 2003), it could be argued that creativity and learning are increasingly embedded in daily work practices and interactions with others (Edwards, 2010). Thus, the disconnect is between both informal and formal learning and between learning as knowledge transmission and learning as knowledge construction. At the same time, to enable flexible and fast-paced work, learning and working is increasingly becoming the responsibility of employees and teams themselves. It is suggested that this kind of work requires new forms of support (Lemmetty & Collin, 2020).

Practices and Structures Supporting Creativity and Learning—A Focus on HRM The importance of organisational practices, leadership and HRM for fostering both organisational productivity and employee well-being have recently been emphasised within the contexts of working life, organisational functions and employee requirements. Leadership and management can be seen as broad entities, where HRM plays a crucial role in the success of organisations because it is related to employee well-being (Meglich, 2015), organisational productivity (Boselie et al., 2005), and creativity and learning (Jimenez-Jimenez & Sanz-Valle, 2012). HRM’s key practices include recruitment, training and development, performance management, performance-based rewards, teamwork, employment continuity and communication (Armstrong & Taylor, 2014; Jimenez-Jimenez & Sanz-Valle, 2012; Pilbeam & Corbridge, 2010; Ulric & Dulebohn, 2015). HRM is linked to organisational strategy and structures, day-to-day leadership and managerial work (Pilbeam & Corbridge, 2010). Nowadays, the role of HRM is more of being a strategic partner than an administrative problem handler (Armstrong & Taylor, 2014; Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015). HRD is considered a part of HRM—with a special emphasis on training, development and learning—and supports the development of personnel skills. HRD is a subfunction of leadership and HRM (Lee, 2016) refers to all practices supporting training and learning at and for work, as well as from and through work (Kuchinke, 2017). The ultimate

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purpose of HRD is to enhance learning in organisations by motivating personnel and developing an organisational culture that promotes the acquisition and sharing of knowledge and expertise (DeLong & Fahey, 2000). Recently, the importance of HRD for the creativity of employees in organisations has become increasingly noted (e.g. Joo et al., 2013), given that creativity is strongly associated with employee competence, previous knowledge and expertise (Amabile, 1996; Runco, 2015), and workplace learning (Lemmetty & Collin, 2020). For this reason, promoting creativity should be one of the key objectives of HRD (Jiang et al., 2012; Loewenberger, 2013). HRM and HRD should be intertwined with all other activities of an organisation and, therefore, linked to both organisational practices and structures. As mentioned above, HRM focuses on leadership and managerial work in the form of mentoring people, recruitment, job planning, career development and team building (Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015). HRM plays an important role in promoting employee creativity and learning and developing practices that support learning. However, organisational structures also create frameworks for different practices that are continuously changing. In growth companies in particular, management strives to respond quickly and flexibly to intensifying competition while increasing turnover and the number of employees. One of the trends that has become typical in Finnish companies is the change from a hierarchical, bureaucratic organisational structure to a low hierarchical, even self-directed, one (Holbeche, 2015; Lee & Edmondson, 2017). At the same time, organisations are increasingly expecting agility in HRM practices (Heilmann et al., 2018). For example, Auvinen et al. (2018) have found that leadership style and HRM practices in high-tech growth companies evolved from hierarchical and managerialist to more self-managed, autonomous and nonmanagerial. So far, however, there is only scant knowledge of such organisations (Lee & Edmondson, 2017). Consequently, it is important to find out what organisational structures and practices support or limit creativity and learning. In our first sub-study as part of the HeRMo project (see Table 11.1), we examined the connections between collective creativity, workplace climate, managerial work and organisational hierarchy. Here, we wanted

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Sub-studies and research questions

Title of the sub-study

Research questions of the study

1. The Relationship of Collective Creativity with Managerial Work and Workplace Climate in Hierarchical and Less Hierarchical Organisations (Riivari et al., forthcoming) 2. Self-Organised Structure in the Field of ICT—Challenges for Employees’ Workplace Learning (Collin et al., 2021)

1. How do managerial work and workplace climate influence collective creativity in organisations with different types of hierarchies?

3. Human Resources Development Practices Supporting Creativity in Finnish Growth Companies (Collin et al., 2020)

4. Conflicts Related to Human Resource Management in Finnish Project-Based Companies (Lemmetty, Keronen, Auvinen & Collin, 2020)

1. What learning-related challenges or problematic features are described in self-organised structures? 2. What are the consequences of these problematic features on employee learning? 1. What kinds of requirements for creativity do the personnel describe in their work? 2. What human resources development practices align with the requirements of creativity as defined by employees? 1. What kind of conflicts and their consequences are described by employees in project-based companies? 2. What areas of human resource management practice can these conflict situations be seen to engage with?

to determine the role of organisational hierarchy in enhancing creativity. We examined these relationships in three different types of organisations: (a) organisations that have a high organisational hierarchy (with traditional management and supervisory positions), (b) organisations with a low hierarchy (with supervisors and autonomous teams) and (c) organisations with no hierarchy (no designated supervisors at all). This is an important theme to examine because previous studies have called for a study of organisations with different hierarchical levels (Collin et al., 2018), particularly for self-organised firms; indeed, there are indications that a low hierarchy would increase innovation (Lee & Edmondson, 2017). In the second sub-study, we focused on examining the effects of organisational structure on learning (see Table 11.1). Here, like the

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previous research, research was guided by the need to examine selforganising, and thus low-hierarchy, organisations (Lee & Edmondson, 2017). Thus, through the first two sub-studies, we gained an understanding of the effects of organisational structures on creativity and learning. HRM and HRD practices were examined in Sub-studies 3 and 4 (see Table 11.1). We approached HRM in organisations as a human-centred activity that includes humane practices (Ulrich & Dulebohn, 2015), reflects the values and ideologies of the entire organisation (Schwepker, 1999) and enhances the creativity and learning of employees and the entire organisation (Lilova & Poell, 2019; Loewenberger, 2013). Thus, during our research project, we identified different HRD practices within the participating organisations and elaborated on how these practices support employees’ possibilities for creativity at work. In Sub-study 3, we utilised Jimenez-Jimenez and Sanz-Valle’s (2012) categorisation of HR practices as an analytical framework, where it is possible to divide HRD into seven broad categories: job design, teamwork, staffing, career development, training, performance appraisal and compensation. However, we also noticed that the positive aspects of HRM have been generally questioned because HRM produces an image of people being managed as resources (Inkson, 2008), that are expensive when it comes to the organisational overhead (Storey, 1989). For this reason, we wanted to examine HRM from a critical perspective—focusing on those HRM practices that do not meet employee expectations and values, hence creating conflicts (see Moser, 1988) that can have negative consequences for the well-being, creativity and learning of individuals (DeTienne et al., 2012; Thorne, 2010). Therefore, in Sub-study 4, we identified different kinds of conflicts in the participating organisations and examined within which HRM practices these conflicts arise. As an analytical tool to locate HRM practices, we used Ulric and Dulebohn’s (2015) framework for the categorisation of HR profession characteristics. We divided HRM goals and practices into four categories: (a) people-related practices (including practices related to workforce planning, recruitment, training, development and engagement), (b) performance-related practices (including rewards, feedback, senior management, goal setting and behavioural

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evaluations), (c) information-related practices (including internal and external communication in organisation) and (d) work-related practices (including the functions and structures of the organisation).

Aims, Questions and Sub-studies of the HeRMo Project The aim of the current research and development project was to (a) examine how creativity and learning emerge in growth companies, (b) identify the types of HRM structures and practices within growth companies, and (c) understand which HRM structures and practices support or restrict creativity and learning at work. The project contains four sub-studies focusing on HRM, creativity and learning. The research questions of the sub-studies are presented in Table 11.1.

Methodology and Data Mixed Methods and Ethnographic Approaches Creativity and HRM at work have often been studied using surveys and statistical methods, thus enabling a general but superficial understanding of various dynamic connections. Statistical approaches alone are not sufficient to shed light on the crucial, qualitative nuances of everyday working life. Because research on creativity and HRM practices in organisations clearly lacks the kinds of methodological tools that would enable a wide and profound description of the interconnections between individual actors and the surrounding community and contexts, we utilised ethnographic (e.g. Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007), as well as quantitative and qualitative, approaches to gain a broader and more holistic understanding that could make significant contributions to both theory and practice.

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Data In the HeRMo project, the target organisations were Finnish growth companies from the construction, technology and artistic design sectors. In addition to the field of industry, the target organisations differed in size, location and organisational structure (hierarchy level). The companies included both units that have operated for more than 20 years and small and agile companies. The target organisations were interested in receiving support because of an increase in the number of their employees and the development of new technologies requiring constant changes in daily work. These changes force employees to reflect on and promote their skills through various means of workplace learning, thereby enabling creative activity. Although organisations have different traditions, practices and structures, the pursuit of flexibility and competitiveness was a common aim across all organisations under study. This was achieved in the organisations by lowering hierarchies, creating project teams, increasing the responsibility and freedom of individuals or reducing bureaucracy. The organisations have been given pseudonyms: technology, industrial, software, information, resolution, and design. The data collected were examined through four sub-studies, which are described in more detail in Tables 11.1 and 11.2. In each substudy, the target organisations, themes, data formats and analyses were selected based on the research aims and questions. Within the mixed methods and ethnographic framework, a multimethod approach towards data gathering and analysis was applied. First, a survey of employees’ experiences of creativity, leadership and management, as related to organisational culture and their life conditions and creativity at work, was conducted. The survey investigated the conceptions of managers, leaders and their subordinates regarding their roles as creative practitioners and their opportunities to exercise creativity. From the project’s point of view, the relevant indicators were managerial work and climate indicators (Heiskanen & Jokinen, 2015) and the questions measuring creativity (as applied by Bissola and Imperatori [2011]). Second, a total of 118 interviews were conducted; the participants were employees of the organisations, middle managers and top management. The interviewees were randomly selected, and the

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Data and findings of the HeRMo project

Sub-study

Data and analysis

Main findings

Sub-study 1

Electronic questionnaire responses (N = 265) consist of respondents’ accounts of collective creativity, managerial work and workplace climate Multiple linear regression and correlation analysis A total of 36 thematic interviews with the personnel of two self-organised organisations (software and information) Content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005)

The climate in the workplace and managerial work are linked to collective creativity Managerial work mediates the relationship between workplace climate and collective creativity. Organisational hierarchy does not change the relationship between climate and creativity

Sub-study 2

Sub-study 3

A total of 98 thematic interviews with the personnel of five growth organisations Content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006)

Problematic features of self-organised organisations in relation to employee learning are unclear structures, unclear roles and a lack of responsibility. These features cause challenges in guidance and support for learning, challenges in long-term sustainable competence development and challenges with organising and prioritising work tasks related to learning Requirements of creativity described by employees are time and freedom, resources and support, possibilities for competence development, collectivity, a peaceful work environment and versatile work content HRD practices aligning with these requirements are related to multifaceted tasks, communication, individual and team autonomy, self-directed project teams, sparring partners, developmental teams, competence-based recruitment, employee-oriented career paths, formal and informal trainings, spontaneous training and learning possibilities, developmental and check-point discussions, team meetings, clear organisational structures, flexible practices and sparring supervisory work (continued)

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Table 11.2

(continued)

Sub-study

Data and analysis

Main findings

Sub-study 4

A total of 95 thematic interviews with the personnel of five growth organisations Content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006)

Conflicts between employer and employee emerged in cases of lack of employee orientation in people-related HRM practices, unfairness in performance-related HRM practices, lack of transparency and contradictory action in information-related HRM practices, and lack of clarity in work-related HRM practices The consequences of the conflicts were experienced by employees as frustration, problems in getting help, a slower pace of work, stress, motivation problems, illness, feelings of insecurity and inequality, and anxiety. These can become problems for creativity and learning at work

interviews were semi-structured thematic interviews. The themes were management and staffing, creativity and learning, and competence development. In addition, the interviews discussed the work community, the support needed at work and work interactions. The interviewees were asked more specific questions about each, if necessary. Surveys and interviews were designed to facilitate a comparison of different professional groups, fields of industry and the sizes of the different organisations.

Analysis Methods suitable for the research context, using both theory- and data-driven methodologies, were applied. The units of analysis were determined in accordance with the purpose of the research and the research questions. Various analytical tools within the mixed methods and ethnographic framework yielded the findings described below. Basic information from the survey data—namely, tools for comparing different professional groups, fields of activity and the sizes and structures (hierarchy levels) of the organisations—were developed. Multiple linear

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regression and correlation analyses were used as analytical tools for the questionnaire data. In addition, thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) were employed in the qualitative sub-studies. Because both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods and analytical tools were used, the validity and credibility of the research were enhanced by the application of methods and researcher triangulation (Patton, 2002). In the case of the quantitative surveys, multiple ways to enhance the validity and credibility of the data were employed (e.g. large enough samples and validity tests). Method triangulation means that key aspects of the research phenomenon and contexts are taken into account when combining different data sets (surveys and interviews). Thus, method triangulation was used to increase the internal validity of the data analysis and create a multifaceted understanding of the phenomenon of interest. Each stage of the analysis involved at least two researchers.

Summary of the Main Findings of the Sub-studies of the HeRMo Project Next, we present the main findings of the sub-studies in a condensed fashion and elaborate on the conclusions of the project more broadly. In Table 11.2, we describe the studied phenomena and original publications of the sub-studies, the utilised data in each of the studies and the main findings. The results from Sub-study 1 (Riivari et al., forthcoming) indicate that collective and collaborative creativity takes place in the interactions found in all the studied organisations. The results also demonstrate that workplace climate and managerial work are connected with collective creativity. When comparing different hierarchical levels in organisations (high level, low level and self-organised), the level of hierarchy did not change the relationship between climate and creativity or managerial work and creativity—that is, the connections were similar regardless of the level of hierarchy. Consequently, it can be inferred that the climate

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of the workplace and managerial work are important for creativity, regardless of organisational hierarchy. In Sub-study 2 (Collin et al., 2021), it was found that in self-organised organisations, the personnel described a variety of challenges for workplace learning. Special attention was paid to those challenges suggested as emerging from the self-organised structure (i.e. low hierarchies). A selforganised structure appeared to sometimes foster unclear roles, as well as problems in having and taking responsibilities. These, in turn, are reflected as challenges in having long-term sustainable competence development, receiving support when needed, and organising one’s work and learning, as well as prioritising it. Learning was described as constantly occurring and as embedded in everyday work practices. Sub-study 3 (Collin et al., 2020) found creativity in growth companies as strongly connected to competence development and learning. Therefore, a variety of tools to support learning are required. In interviews, the employees stated that their creativity requires time and freedom, resources and support, possibilities for competence development, collectivity, a peaceful work environment, and versatile work content. Several kinds of creativity-supporting HRD structures and practices were already in use in the organisations under study, such as project and developmental teams, competence-based recruitment, and developmental and check-point discussions with a supervisor or HR manager. Sub-study 4 (Lemmetty et al., 2020) revealed a variety of problematic HRM practices that emerge from teamwork, communication and everyday leadership. Informed by the findings, HRM practices can result in conflicts between an employer and employee when they are not based on employee-orientedness, fairness, transparency or clarity. The consequences of the conflicts were experienced by employees as frustration, problems in getting help, a slower pace of work, stress, motivation problems and illness, feelings of insecurity and inequality, and anxiety. These consequences can also produce problems for employees’ learning and creativity at work.

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Four Main Conclusions from the HeRMo Project Learning and creativity processes at work can be seen both as individual activities and as group activities and interactions (Collin et al., 2020; Riivari et al., forthcoming). In addition, they have been discussed in the literature as strongly intertwined phenomena (Amabile, 1996; Ford, 1996; Runco, 2015). Creativity requires learning that is emerged in different work practices (Lemmetty & Collin, 2020). The manifestations of creativity and learning are influenced by the environment in which individuals and groups operate. Because of these factors, it is clear that all activities within an organisation contribute to the promotion and support of learning and creativity. In the HeRMo project, we looked at supporting learning and creativity, especially from the perspectives of the HRM and HRD frameworks. However, these are not limited to individual staffing activities such as recruitment, training, and rewards, but to a wide range of management activities ranging from daily managerial work to reaching organisational strategic solutions. Based on the previous literature and the findings of our research project, we have formed four conclusions that focus on supporting creativity and learning at work: 1. Creativity and learning are collective and informal phenomena at work, 2. A variety of structures and practices enable creativity and learning at work, 3. Both equality and employee orientation in structures and practices are important, 4. A context-specific examination of creativity, learning and supporting practices is needed.

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Creativity and Learning Are Collective and Informal Phenomena at Work The manifestations of creativity and learning have been examined in the context of working life and it has been found that they are often strongly collective, attached to everyday work practices and, thus, also oftentimes informal (see also Anderson et al., 2014; Lemmetty & Collin, 2019). It has been typical to connect creativity and learning to dailybased problem-solving processes and developmental work (see also Collin et al., 2017). Because of mainly project-based work, requiring collaboration with both colleagues and customers, it is natural that creativity emerges in these particular situations. Our survey data showed that collective creativity was present in all the studied organisations (see Riivari et al., forthcoming). The descriptions of creativity were examined in our research project, especially in substudy 3 (see Collin et al., 2020). Although the main aim was to focus on employees’ descriptions of the issues supporting creativity, it was not possible to separate these descriptions from the participants’ definitions of creativity. In this context especially, the descriptions of creativity as informal and practical were predominant. Expert work was identified as creative because the tasks and projects at hand included new kinds of problems that needed to be solved. In turn, problem-solving often required learning new things and seeking information, either individually or collectively. Interviewees stressed the importance of colleagues in developing expertise and advancing problem-solving processes. Younger and less experienced workers in particular saw collaboration with more experienced ones as important (Collin et al., 2020). The need to make creative solutions and, thus, to also learn something new, stems strongly from everyday work tasks. The tasks of different actors in the organisations under study were linked to each other and formed entities. For this reason, cooperation between different actors, but also an understanding of the overall picture in organisations, is crucial (Collin et al., 2020, 2021).

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A Variety of Structures and Practices Enable Creativity and Learning at Work Because there are many different tasks that require creativity and learning in working life, organisations need a variety of structures and practices to manage and support them. Recent studies of creativity have emphasised the features of looseness, limitlessness and (non)laboriousness as important for creativity (see, for example, Collin et al., 2018). At the same time, many kinds of external concerns (clients, business aims, colleagues and stakeholders) affect people’s actions at work, despite prevailing high or low organisational hierarchies. In our research, we found that creativity and learning can be enabled by a wide variety of organisational structures and practices. In other words, the structure itself does not necessarily increase or limit opportunities for creativity and learning, but what mattered was how people experienced these structures: are they realised as supportive or controlling? (Lemmetty et al., 2020; Riivari et al., forthcoming). Additionally, the need for clear and transparent roles and frames were repeated in the interviewees’ answers (Collin et al., 2021). Thus, employees need to know where to seek help and support. In enhancing the integrity and clarity of the aforementioned features in organisations, the role of HRM can become vital. Our research project revealed a wide range of practical ways to support creativity and learning: various team models, sparring partners or development groups promoting collaboration and interaction were perceived as useful arenas for creativity and learning (Collin et al., 2020). Different kinds of discussions between supervisor and subordinate were also seen as an important space in planning and evaluating one’s own learning. Many of these actions implemented in the organisation also supported goal setting at the individual, team and organisational level, making it possible to direct creativity and learning towards goals.

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Equality and Employee Orientation in Structures and Practices Are Important Organisations’ structures and practices create and maintain an organisational culture. Our research highlighted that a wide variety of organisational structures or practices may appear to be conducive to creativity and learning, but it is still important to consider our results related to workplace climate and managerial work as well: open and encouraging climate and supportive, coaching managerial work became a more essential factor in terms of collective creativity than the levels of the organisational hierarchy (Riivari et al., forthcoming). Thus, it is important to pay attention to how organisational culture and climate are communicated and spread in organisations through structures, roles, and practices. Clearness is also important in terms of organisational culture and practices. Our findings reveal that clear structures for support, collegiality and a cosy climate enhance creativity and learning. These factors prevail in a support-enhancing climate within the organisation. The conflicting situations studied (in sub-study 4) also showed that employees hoped for HR and leadership to be equal, referring also to the organisational culture that isconstructed in everyday practices and encounters. Consequently, the role of HRM is to build a big picture for everybody, offer equal possibilities for people to learn and develop themselves, and show direction for various actors in the organisation. Our project also indicates that if HRM and organisational culture are based on making a profit and on ‘tough’ values, that employees’ perspectives are not taken into account or the organisation is not equal, there is a risk of exhaustion, decreased motivation and, with them, of a loss of creativity and learning. The lack of equal and employee-orientedness in organisations also caused pressures, fatigue and stress (Lemmetty et al., 2020). By designating ‘soft’ values as secondary and considering people only as resources, HRM can harm profitability. Instead, in organisations where people are seen as the key actors in making creative outcomes, implementing creative processes and increasing organisational competence, employee orientation could be seen as a natural part of the culture, that emerge behind the structures and practices (Collin et al., 2020; Lemmetty et al., 2020). Decision-making should

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be participative and should support employees’ possibilities to influence their own work. Simultaneously, HRM should mean taking care of the personnel’s capacity to work, including their safety and well-being, without neglecting the company’s profitability. In the HeRMo project, we also noticed that the requirement of being equal and fair and employee-oriented at the same time can produce a paradoxical situation, as all should be treated equally and fairly and yet approached as individuals. However, during the project, we understood that this paradox was not necessarily restricting. Fairness and equality can be seen as the starting point on which the company’s basic HR plans and guidelines are based, still leaving opportunities for individuals to make choices and influence within these frameworks. In practice, this can mean, for example, that every employee is offered the same possibilities for learning, but every employee also chooses to use these possibilities as they find meaningful. Thus, fairness could result in new possibilities for an employee-oriented mindset.

A Context-Specific Examination of Creativity, Learning and Supporting Practices Is Needed It is important to acknowledge that theoretical connections and understandings affect the ways in which creativity and learning are addressed and practically manifested, recognised and supported in the everyday work of different organisations. Learning, addressed from the perspective of knowledge transmission, has practical and pragmatic implications that also connect with knowledge (objective and absolute), whereas a knowledge construction and reconstruction perspective takes a more relativistic and subjective tone and ‘move’ learning into an informal realm, closer to creativity. This latter approach also affects the evaluation and measurement of creativity and learning, and, therefore, the methods of validating them. Knowledge transmission points of view, as well as more objective evaluations of creativity, create a dangerous dichotomy when compared with the knowledge construction paradigm—required by contemporary working life—and its adjoined, more subjective, approaches to creativity.

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Creativity and learning seemed to be an essential part of the personnel’s everyday work. Thus, their role in developing the business and profitability of the growth company is important. In organising workplace learning, more traditional knowledge transmission approaches compete (and clash) with knowledge construction paradigms that expand into informal learning opportunities, and they both need to be addressed. Similarly, creativity needs to be addressed at different levels. Our findings also emphasise the need to further investigate how to best support creativity and learning in different organisations. Previous studies have shown that many of the phenomena in working life are highly context- and industry-specific (see, for example, Collin et al., 2018). In the HeRMo project, we could not find such unambiguous HRM/leadership structures or models that would be functional in any organisation. Instead, we found many context-specific HRD practices that support creativity and learning (see Collin et al., 2020; Lemmetty et al., 2020). Interestingly, many examples of functional HRD practices were also found. Similarly, HRM practices can create conflicts and questionable actions but can also be responsible within their contexts. Thus, the variation seems to depend on whose opinion is sought, and what the respondent’s experience of the issue at hand is.

Closing Thoughts Based on the HeRMo project, we can conclude that clear and transparent structures and roles, as well as equal and employee-oriented HRM practices, support creativity and learning at work. These practices vary depending on the industry, size and mission of the organisation. The most functional HRM practices in the participating organisations seemed to be developed by listening to the personnel and collaborating with employees, with management then taking into account organisation-specific features and situations. Therefore, we believe that the solutions brought from outside of the organisation do not result, most of the time, in the hoped outcomes. Creativity, learning and HRM should be analysed and defined by the organisation, teams and individuals in a thoughtful and engaging manner. This sounds easy, but, very

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often, there is too little time for reviews or the setting of future goals because of business pressures. Thus, courage is needed from the organisation to stop and critically elaborate on what kind of creativity it hopes to see from its employees, how it defines creativity, and how creativity is supported in a way that enhances profitability. With HR practices increasingly becoming a part of organisations’ strategies, more comprehensive studies investigating organisations are needed, especially to provide a more detailed understanding of how to support creativity and learning in a turbulent working life. In addition to growth organisations, more research on these phenomena in other organisations is required. Because of the context-bound nature of this chapter, we especially need research involving small start-ups and large hierarchical public sector organisations. Although the needs and wishes—and even definitions of creativity and learning—of all the organisations above are inevitably different, we believe that continuous learning is needed in all organisations, no matter the industry. Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Finnish Work Environment Fund (project number 117300).

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Correction to: Creativity and Learning ˘ Soila Lemmetty, Kaija Collin, Vlad Petre Glaveanu, and Panu Forsman

Correction to: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2 The original version of this book was inadvertently published without the second affiliation of the author and series editor (Vlad Petre Gl˘aveanu), which has now been included in FM, Chapters 1 and 11. The book has been updated with the changes.

The updated online version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_11 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2

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Correction to: Creativity and Learning ˘ Soila Lemmetty, Kaija Collin, Vlad Petre Glaveanu, and Panu Forsman

Correction to: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2 The original version of Chapters 1 and 6 were inadvertently published as non-open access, which has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license, and the copyright holder has been updated to ‘The Author(s)’. The corrections to the chapter have been updated with the changes.

The updated original version of these chapters can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_6

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Correction to: Virtual Enterprise Simulation Game as an Environment for Collaborative Creativity and Learning Ari Tuhkala, Kirsi Syynimaa, Kirsi Lainema, Joni Lämsä, Timo Lainema, and Raija Hämäläinen

Correction to: Chapter 8 in: S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_8 The original version of Chapter 8 was inadvertently published as nonopen access, which has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license, and the copyright holder has been updated to ‘The Author(s)’. The correction to the chapter has been updated with the change.

The updated original version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2_8

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Index

A

Ability 29, 53, 93, 101, 117, 184, 185, 187, 196, 220, 221, 233, 240 “Actionable uncertainty” 29 Active engagement 36 “Active subject” aspect 15 Activity-oriented “grammar 169 Affordances 6, 15, 19, 64, 95, 102, 103, 229, 232 Agency 5, 10, 12, 13, 15–18, 46, 49, 53, 55, 57, 59, 64, 65, 126, 149, 150, 231, 233, 240 Agentic judgments 30 Alternative educational movements 82 Alternative ways of thinking 184 Artifacts 32, 40, 41, 93, 94, 98–100, 102, 103 Authentic experience 16, 183

Autonomy 6, 13, 17, 18, 123, 149, 152, 178, 233, 241, 257 Autonomy of students 135 Available school spaces 135

B

Behaviourism 3, 246 Bi-dimensional plane 74

C

Case study 11, 46, 48–51, 55, 59, 118, 121, 139 Change Laboratory 147, 148, 151–154, 157, 167–169 Changing environments 12, 15 Cognitivism 3, 246 Collaborative activities 121 Collaborative co-construction 17

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Lemmetty et al. (eds.), Creativity and Learning, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77066-2

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274

Index

Collaborative creativity 121 Collaborative learning 4, 8, 11, 17, 20, 104, 168, 176–178, 182, 185–190 Collective creativity 197, 249 Collective learning 79, 95, 100, 157 Collective processes 150 Common understanding creation of 19 Community 5, 6, 14, 19, 54, 93, 94, 108, 119, 124, 129, 130, 132–135, 137–139, 146, 147, 153, 167, 170, 176, 178, 198, 255, 258 Competence 1, 3, 7, 38, 90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 124, 125, 205, 206, 208, 250, 252, 257, 258, 260, 264 Competencies 70–73, 187–189, 195 discipline-specific 81 Complications 103 Computational Thinking 93 Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) 177 Computing education 89–91, 95, 97, 98, 103, 105–109 Concentration 70, 71 Conflicts 12, 182, 212, 254, 258, 260, 266 Constructivism 5, 12, 16, 18, 248 Constructivist approach 3, 7, 56, 178, 246 Constructivist learning paradigm 13 Constructivist paradigm 17, 250 Contingency 14, 15, 159, 160 Continuous learning 2, 7, 245, 267 Co-occurrence 12, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 239, 241 Creare 196

Creative abilities 39, 40 Creative activity 7, 8, 25, 146, 164, 198, 245, 247, 256 Creative acts 147, 148, 155–157, 159, 160, 164, 167–169 Creative agency 46 Creative behavior 249 Creative ecological approach 121 Creative ecologies 117, 120, 121, 124, 130, 138, 139 Creative ecologies model 16, 132, 139 Creative experiences 25 Creative initiative 156 Creative knowledge processes 195–197, 200–204, 208, 210–213 Creative leaps 148, 156, 157, 168 Creative learning 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 26–41, 76, 98, 99, 200 Creative meaning making 32 Creative pedagogical resources 123 Creative pedagogies 4, 116 Creative processes 8, 10, 14, 76, 98, 102, 146–149, 151, 154–156, 159, 165, 167–169, 198, 204, 206, 208, 213, 248, 264 Creative risks 30, 39 Creative teaching 117 Creative work 46, 56, 58, 59, 61–64, 204, 212 Creativities-in-practice 130 Creativity 2, 9, 55, 73, 76, 98, 115, 118, 122, 136, 147, 149, 196–198, 200, 209, 250, 261 as an object-oriented process 150 criteria for 249 development of 64 “in action” 153

Index

‘standard’ definition of 2, 93 Creativity in discourse 148 Creativity in groups 197 “Creativity-in-learning” 30 Creativity learning 178 Creativity-relevant knowledge 105 Cultural activity 200 Culturally shared process 178 Culture 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 71–73, 117, 124, 129, 146, 168, 169, 238 Curiosity 208, 212 Curricular activities 34 Curricular design 38 Curriculum planning 152

D

Daily-based problem-solving 262 De novo innovations 220, 221 Design Thinking 131 Dialogical polyphony 211 Dialogue 4, 8, 19, 82, 117, 130, 150, 200–202, 208–211 Didactic support 18, 105 Different perspectives 208–213 Digital artifact 93, 98–103 Digital Design and Design Processes 93, 98 Digital Empowerment 92 Digital learning platforms 137 Digital technology 101 Digital transformation 91 Distributed creativity 59, 146–149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 160, 164, 167–169 emergence of 151 Divergent thinking 60, 179 Diverse creativities as practice 11, 116

275

Domain-specific skills 188

E

Ecological theory 117 Ecosystem of partners 137 Educational change 11, 117, 130, 148 Educational landscapes 116 Educational policies 132 Educational spaces 132 Educational system 75, 83, 84 Emerging in social interaction 197 Empowering students 135 Encountered uncertainty 35, 37 Engagement 7, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 29, 81, 101, 104, 105, 127, 178, 221, 224, 227–230, 232–236, 238, 239, 241, 254 Ethnographic framework 256 Everyday creativity 11, 12, 16, 117, 122, 123, 125, 138–140 Evolving systems approach 48, 49, 51, 53–55, 58, 64 Evolving systems method 63 Expansive learning 146–151, 153, 155, 157, 160, 164, 167–170 Expansive learning actions 147 Experimental epistemology 52, 53 Expertise 1, 7, 8, 18, 117, 146, 176, 199, 205, 206, 209, 252, 262 Expert work 262 Explanatory orientation 224

F

Finnish models of education 123, 125

276

Index

Finnish National Agency for Education (FNAE) 123 Finnish National Core Curriculum (FNCC) 123 Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education 152 Five A’s framework 95, 97–104, 106, 107, 109 Flexible mental ability 179 Formal learning 250, 251 Formal programs 41 Four C model 94, 95, 107 Four P model 94, 95, 107

G

General abilities 188 Generalization 57, 58 “Genetic epistemology” 53 Gestalt perspective 50 Growth companies 12, 248, 252, 255, 256, 260 Gruber, Howard 46, 47

H

Hierarchical levels 253, 259 Historical materialism 49, 50, 53 Horizontal approach 76 HRD. See Human resources development (HRD) HRM. See Human resources management (HRM) Human beings, active agents 200 Human–nonhuman interactivity 131 Human resources development (HRD) 12, 247, 251, 252, 254, 257, 260, 261, 266

Human resources management (HRM) 12, 247, 248, 251, 252, 254, 255, 258, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266

I

Idea development process 204 Ideas 3, 6, 8, 15, 18, 26, 39–41, 49, 52–56, 58–60, 62, 63, 65, 72, 73, 76, 93, 94, 129, 138, 139, 145, 150, 157, 161, 162, 167–169, 175, 177, 178, 183–185, 190, 195–202, 204–209, 211, 232, 249 Identity development 40 Immersive environment 16, 180 Improving students’ critical thinking 135 Individual agency 10, 47 Individual creativity 197, 249 Individualism 46, 47, 61–63 Individual psychology 9 Informal learning 222, 250, 266 Information and communication technologies (ICT) 71 Information Society 72 Innovation 1, 11, 12, 14, 76, 96, 122, 125, 126, 132, 146, 147, 149–151, 169, 175, 195, 197, 203, 205, 207, 212, 213, 220–241 Innovative culture 213 Innovative idea 203, 204 Institutional facts 224 Instructional Design 83 Intelligence 70–75, 77, 78, 80–84 Interaction episode 155, 158, 160, 164, 167–169

Index

Interactive process 11, 168, 178 Interdisciplinary 11, 78, 79, 100, 106, 108, 152, 196, 201–203, 212 Interpretative analysis 97 Interprofessional learning 121 Interpsychological processes 7, 26–28, 33 Intertwined 147 Intertwined phenomena 4, 7, 197, 200, 261 Intrapsychological process 27

J

Joint engagement 200

K

Knowledge 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 20, 30, 40, 47, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 70–73, 78, 79, 82, 83, 90, 92, 93, 99, 103, 105, 109, 116, 127, 138, 139, 146, 147, 149–151, 154, 168, 176–179, 185, 187, 189, 195–199, 201, 203–205, 207–209, 212, 236, 246, 247, 250, 252 Knowledge-building approach 199 Knowledge construction 198, 246–251, 265, 266 Knowledge creation 150, 156, 197–200 Knowledge transmission 250, 251, 265, 266

277

L

Leadership 7, 63, 73, 124, 158, 167, 168, 170, 189, 247, 251, 252, 256, 260, 264 Leadership training curricula 176 Learners, partners 135 Learning 3–12, 26, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 62, 64, 71, 73, 77, 78, 125, 147, 150, 151, 178, 186, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 206, 221–226, 228, 229, 233, 235, 236, 239, 246, 247, 249–251, 254, 263, 265 Learning Design 83 Learning environment 29, 31, 34, 37, 94, 108, 125, 131–135, 138, 150, 151, 186, 235 Learning how to learn 71 Learning outcome 3, 8, 12, 63, 90, 98, 99, 152, 223 Learning theories 3, 246 Learning trajectory 29, 30 Lifelong creative development 62 Lifelong education 223 Lifelong learning 61, 62, 75, 152, 223 Lifespan creative development 51 Little-c creative 31 Loose pedagogical space 78

M

Managerial work 251–253, 256, 257, 259–261, 264 Marxist paradigm 47 Mediating devices 150 Method triangulation 259 Mini-c creative 31 Mixed methods 255, 256, 258

278

Index

Monodisciplinary 99, 106 Morality 46, 47, 53–55, 65 Multidimensional nature 9 Municipal curriculum 152 Mutual construction 188

N

Narratives 11, 32, 53, 131, 133, 138 National core curriculum 152, 158, 161 Natural creative impulses 121 Natural selection 52, 53, 56 Network of enterprise 48, 49, 53, 56–58, 62 New learning spaces 135

O

Organic creativity 10, 72 Organic learning 12, 15, 17, 18 Organisational hierarchy 252 Organisational practices 251 Organisational structures 19, 252, 254, 257 Organizational culture 117, 149, 252, 256, 264 Out-of-context development 82

Personalization 71 Perspectives 2, 3, 9, 12, 16, 30, 31, 34, 60, 61, 103, 129, 138, 183, 188, 196, 198, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 250, 261, 264 Physical environment 133, 135 Planned uncertainty 35, 37, 38, 40 Polyphony 196, 201, 202, 204 Practice 3–5, 7–9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 26, 33, 34, 38–41, 53, 61, 64, 65, 77, 78, 83, 96, 118–120, 122, 125, 128, 130–132, 134, 137–139, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 158, 160, 169, 170, 209, 210, 220, 221, 223–227, 233, 234, 236–241, 246–248, 250–258, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266 Problem solving 2, 4, 7, 98, 188, 249, 250, 262 Problem-solving activity 149, 187 Professional identities 11, 131 Professional learning 130

Q

Qualitative research approach 96

P

R

Participation 15, 18, 124, 135, 136, 153, 186, 187, 199, 221, 240 Participatory creativity 59, 60 Pedagogical compass 166 Pedagogical leadership 148, 156, 157, 160, 164, 167–169 Pedagogical practices 130, 133 Pedagogical time 77–79

Real-life learning 12 Reconstruction 147, 223, 247, 248, 250, 265 Reflection 36, 72, 92, 103, 126, 128, 132, 134, 138, 155, 185, 189, 190, 250 Relationship 26, 27, 33, 39, 46, 57, 59, 60, 73, 74, 78, 79, 93,

Index

119, 121, 134, 138, 184, 202, 222, 253, 257, 259 Research-based teacher education 125 Risk-taking propensity 179

S

Safe environment 180, 184 Scenario thinking 207 School 11, 12, 17, 41, 50, 51, 62, 75–82, 90, 92, 100, 109, 116, 118–122, 124–130, 133–135, 138, 139, 146–148, 150, 152–154, 158, 160–164, 167–169, 176, 182, 197, 212 School environment 133, 134 School-specific curricula 152 Self-managed 252 Self-organised organisations 260 Self-reflective 124, 128, 131, 138 Semiotic landscape 132 Shared creative processes 151 Shared goal 13, 19 Shared learning processes 4 Shared socio-material mediator 162 Sharing of knowledge 188, 252 Situated activity 200 Small-to-medium-size private enterprises (SMEs) 12, 225, 231, 234 SMEs. See Small-to-medium-size private enterprises Social activism 47 Sociocultural approach 6, 249 Socio-cultural context 28 Sociocultural framework 9 Sociocultural nature 5 Sociocultural theory 2, 9, 198 Sociocultural tradition 5, 84

279

Socio-material mediation 148, 155, 168 Solution 14–16, 47, 81, 93, 104, 125, 129, 134, 145, 156, 157, 164, 167, 186, 187, 189, 195, 204, 205, 212, 220, 233, 247, 249, 261, 262, 266 Space-time continuum 74, 75, 77, 80, 82–84 Spatio-temporal teaching-learning device 81 Standardization 69, 71 Stimulus 29 Structures 7, 9, 12, 17, 59, 79, 124, 154, 160, 246–248, 250–252, 255–258, 260, 261, 263, 264, 266 Student agency 146 Student-centered approach 12 Student empowerment 135 Students, partners 133 Sustainable approach 12 Sustainable education 121 Systems theory of development 49

T

Teacher education 116, 117, 121, 123, 125, 131, 137, 138, 140 Teacher-researcher 125 Teacher training 11, 16, 147, 152, 160, 167 Teaching creatively 116 Teaching for creativity 116 Team-based leadership 161 Technological Knowledge and Skills 93 Technology Comprehension 90–93, 95, 96, 98–100, 102–109

280

Index

Technology Comprehension Curriculum 92, 96–104, 106 Thematic analysis 91, 97, 100, 103, 259 Traditional school learning 146 Transdisciplinary logics 78 Transfer 58, 60 Transformative agency 153 21st Century creativity 75 21st century skills 90, 152 U

Uncertainty 10, 13–15, 17, 18, 20, 25, 26, 28–41, 107 Unconventional learning environments 137 V

Vertical approach 76

Viewpoints 9, 16, 132, 208 Virtual enterprise simulation game 11, 182

W

Well-being 20, 72, 251, 254, 265 “Wire-frame lesson designing” 37 Workers’ learning 12, 221–223, 225, 233, 237 Workplace climate 252, 253, 257, 259, 264 Workplace environment 234 Workplace learning 12, 250, 252, 256, 260, 266 Work practices 153, 156, 164, 167, 168, 221, 224, 226, 231, 234, 235, 239, 251, 260–262 Work-related innovations 219